an ordinary kiss

Abstract

This poem responds to a 1944 newspaper article, titled "Venereal Disease in Newfoundland," published in The Western Star (Corner Brook). The article is made up of extracts from a medical address given by Dr. James McGrath that disparaged sex worker communities in St. John's and facilitated a province-wide moral panic over sexual health. Acknowledging the tenacity of sex worker
foremothers and seeking intimate connections within and against the historical record, the form of the erasure poem as counter-narrative responds to the surveillance, abjection, and invisibilizing scrutiny of sex worker lives and bodies, re-storying the article to offer an alternative practice of recognition across time.