I, being born a woman and distressed
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
A NOTE: “For Edna” ((shown below) is Lonny Saleeby’s response to I, being born a woman and distressed by Vincent and was featured in Conversation of the Century with the Trans Poetics Archive, a panel discussion presented by Millay House Rockland at the Rockland Public Library, June 5, 2025. The event responded to the questions posed by Millay’s 1921 suffrage sonnet about being born a woman and distressed from a variety of transgender perspectives, bringing awareness to those voices left out of this past century’s feminist literary canon.
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
—from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923), originally published in Poetica Erotica: A Collection of Rare and Curious Amatory Verses (1921)
For Edna
I, being born human & distressed
By bodily need & forbearance
quenched, lucid & unfulfilled, a being
not yet wholly a god, reaching deeply
past time & circumstance to gain
however trivial & mundane
a fruit grown in neither time nor space
a craving for limblessness & forever
hurled seemingly without conscience
into the vibrancy of my own life
Agency known & unknown to self & other
brought out of the ground & offered to the ground
born in dirt & of dirt & leaking
seaward, back to & with infinite self & oneness
poor in flesh & rich in consciousness
a drop of being touched & engulfed by all other drops
Does not cease to be whole
- -
I being born a baby, and distressed
a collapsed star scrunched and solidified
sprouting from a warm bloodied wound
assaulted by hunger and brightness
a wail wrapped around all bodies in the room
bodies deeming me alive and human
labeling my place and worth and well being
by classification of reproductive organ
my being too large to fit
too seemingly kaleidoscopic
leaked the seam of required simplicity
here we do not have words
to describe the sensation
of infinity crammed into infancy
If this body were to represent
all time and universal energy
cocooned into a temporary vessel of needs
here I am, being and unbeing
holding in one hand the freedom of the temporary
and in the other, constraints of flesh
hurled into the vibrancy of my own life
I am learning to hold worlds
at the tip of each finger,
to balance longing and excess,
to fast and fill in equal measures
spinning beauty from relentlessness
and watching desire live in the moment
as densely as life demands
- -
I, being born human
I, being born electric pulse
I am one thought shifting to another
I am a match to a wick becoming ash
I am born human
I am born fire
I am born electric pulse
I am born lightning
I am born storm
I am born
I am born
I am born
hot
—Lonny Saleeby is a non-binary, multidisciplinary artist devoted to honoring the sacred in the mundane. They were born and live on Wabanaki homeland. “For Edna” was featured in Conversations of the Century with the Trans Poetics Archive, an event presented by Millay House Rockland at the Rockland Public Library, June 5, 2025.
