Micki Topham is a finalist in the 2025 DC Poet Project, an annual open-to-all poetry competition created by Day Eight to support and surface exceptional poets.

Trans Joy 🙂

Each morning I get up
powder my face.
I no longer have to draw in a smile
instead, I fill in my smile
with a pop of red.
It grows as I watch
Hangers scrape metal,
a rolodex of clothing
I never thought I could wear
never dreamed of wearing in public
I pull it over my head
it stops at the knees.
My spin inflates it.
I do a second,
because it’s fun.
And I feel so pretty
A vortex of air forming
around freshly shaven legs
Mmmmmm
I skip to the mirror
Spritz of perfume
I smell so0000 good.
I admire my hair
Two years of hard-earned length
I curl it with an iron,
then twirl it around my finger
like a wedding ring.
My pointer finger popping red
around bouncing locks.
Everything is funner to hold
when your nails are painted.
My feet slip into shoes
That telegraph to the world
My trans joy
In clicks
In clacks


An Ode to the Alarm Clock

I want to be the ambitious person I am at 2 AM.
The person that sets an alarm clock,
expecting my future self to wake up in four and a half hours.
More often than not,
I find myself as the future person
who is violently woken up by an alarm clock
after only four hours of sleep
and laughably resets the clock for another two hours.

I want to be the optimistic person I am on laundry day
the person that keeps that one crusty old sock,
holding out hope, washing cycle after washing cycle,
that maybe this time the prodigal sock will return.
Sometimes I find myself as the person that callously tosses the orphan foot sleeve,
only to find its counterpart shoved under the bed a few weeks later
cursing myself.

But maybe I am both the dreamer and the sleeper,
the keeper and the one who lets go.
Maybe change isn’t waking up at 6 AM
or holding on to everything lost
maybe it’s knowing when to try again
and when to forgive myself.
 

Micki Topham is a poet and spoken word artist originally from a rural, one-stoplight town in Utah. Micki uses her creativity to explore themes of identity, faith, family, and mental health. She won the 2022 S’more Poetry Slam and the 2023 Smooth Grooves and Spoken Word Poetry Slam. In 2024, she found the courage to come out as a trans woman and that same year she and her 3-year-old border collie braved the 2,400 mile drive to Washington D.C. where she is living her dream life as a big city girl.

Featured image in this post is, “Durdle Door at Sunrise” by Lies Thru a Lens, licensed via creative commons 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.