Girls Love, by Alexa Vallejo

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

“My womanhood stands / on a sad boy’s back,” writes Alexa Vallejo, who transitioned in her mid-thirties. In her chapbook, Girls Love, Vallejo uses yuri—Japanese media about romance between female characters—as a point of departure for meditations on the boyhood she lived and the girlhood she never had. Written in a time when trans people enjoy greater visibility while facing heightened persecution, these poems celebrate gender euphoria while addressing anxieties over safety, acceptance, and legal recognition. Vallejo asserts, “I am choosing a lifetime / of fear-tinged joy, anticipating every catastrophe in an age / of catastrophes.”

Girls Love reveals how we can’t move forward until we reckon with our past. Vallejo’s narrative poetry juxtaposes real life with imagined histories in order to make sense of what it means to be a middle-aged trans woman in the United States today.

Alexa Vallejo grew up in Newark, Delaware. The child of Filipino immigrants, her work has appeared in Illuminations, Discount Guillotine, swamp pink, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and TriQuarterly, among others. She lives in West Philadelphia with her wife and two cats, and sometimes plays music for money.