Yvonne LeBien

awakenings

i recorded myself speaking on waking up for about a year. mumblings, dreams, phonemes, half-conscious poems, breath, puff, zephyr, are what i captured. i was the ambience i recorded, i was the field. this is right before i started transitioning so is it the last gasps of my maleness dying out or is it the first breaths of a new female? in reality both. everything is occurring at the same time.

Yvonne LeBien is a trans poet and performer living in Brooklyn. They have poems published with GenderFail Press, Prelude, queer.archive.work, Archway Editions and others, as well as poems in the anthology We Want It All: An Anthology on Radical Trans Poetics by Nightboat Books. They have published two books with GenderFail Press, Scores for Performance Poetry and Betraying Authority: Fragment on Queer Art, as well as the poetry book cumflower with Wendy’s Subway. They have performed at The Poetry Project, Naropa University, Hauser & Wirth, Urban Glass, Trans Pecos and others. Their music can be found at yvonnelebien.bandcamp.com.