NoraCover6x9.png
NoraCover6x9.png

THE MOST HOLY DAY OF THE TRANSSEXUAL CALENDAR

$18.00

THE MOST HOLY DAY OF THE TRANSSEXUAL CALENDAR by Nora Hikari is an investigation into explosive force and cataclysm. Fists collide, arteries burst, beam lasers flare, and fusion weapons permanently scar the landscape with their bitterness. This is a collection concerned with trans grief, the harrowing consequences of living in the midst of an era of boiling transphobic structural violence and anti-trans hysteria. Hikari paints a distorted mirror-world, a cyberpunk hellscape where machinery and meat fuse together at the seams and innocent women are turned into cyborg horses, slaughtered for the entertainment of the “shapely kingship”; a world where “egregores, or emergent consciousnesses, or deepweb gods” arise to hunt down those who would dare challenge the transphobic ruling order. Unyielding in its righteous outrage, THE MOST HOLY DAY weaves prayers and hexes into video game power fantasies where trans people are able to finally exact their revenge, screaming – “FORGIVENESS IS FOR BITCHES. JUSTICE IS A KNIFE.” Yet, Hikari offers us an ultimate truth: that while we need trans vengeance to fight this war, we will not survive without love, without the love of trans people for each other. That the greatest vengeance of all, against an existential threat, is to “[l]et all who seek to humble us into a minor and destitute irrelevance know: tonight, we are alive, and we are dancing!”

THE MOST HOLY DAY OF THE TRANSSEXUAL CALENDAR by Nora Hikari is an investigation into explosive force and cataclysm. Fists collide, arteries burst, beam lasers flare, and fusion weapons permanently scar the landscape with their bitterness. This is a collection concerned with trans grief, the harrowing consequences of living in the midst of an era of boiling transphobic structural violence and anti-trans hysteria. Hikari paints a distorted mirror-world, a cyberpunk hellscape where machinery and meat fuse together at the seams and innocent women are turned into cyborg horses, slaughtered for the entertainment of the “shapely kingship”; a world where “egregores, or emergent consciousnesses, or deepweb gods” arise to hunt down those who would dare challenge the transphobic ruling order. Unyielding in its righteous outrage, THE MOST HOLY DAY weaves prayers and hexes into video game power fantasies where trans people are able to finally exact their revenge, screaming – “FORGIVENESS IS FOR BITCHES. JUSTICE IS A KNIFE.” Yet, Hikari offers us an ultimate truth: that while we need trans vengeance to fight this war, we will not survive without love, without the love of trans people for each other. That the greatest vengeance of all, against an existential threat, is to “[l]et all who seek to humble us into a minor and destitute irrelevance know: tonight, we are alive, and we are dancing!”

Praise for THE MOST HOLY DAY OF THE TRANSSEXUAL CALENDAR

"We live in devastating times, staring down the barrel of revived repression and fascistic jackboots. Hikari meets this moment with the rejuvenating retaliation it deserves. Through crunchy, flashy diction with concrete-dusting rhythm, these poems make clear that even if the only things that make sense anymore are anger, pain, and grief — the only options we have are mutation and resolve and love, embracing the extremity of difference and grit that queerness has borne from us. Through each piece a whole pack makes itself known, every voice of the Wires System thrumming with a unique villainess beat, reaching an apocalyptic resonance that makes us want to drop everything and BARK VICIOUSLY! and LIVE FEARLESSLY! and LOVE EACH AND EVERY TRANSSEXUAL WE MEET, ENDLESSLY!"

—MIKA, author of NO TIGER and previous EIC of SURFACES.cx

“To use a cliché like “deeply human” for this collection would be not only incorrect, but utterly inadequate: this latest set of entries into Hikari’s oeuvre is an urgent, earnest tribute to the inhuman, the perpetually disposable. With Hikari, we step beyond the framework of trans “life”: THE MOST HOLY DAY OF THE TRANSSEXUAL CALENDAR dedicates its pages to the trans dead, dying, inanimate, forsaken, tearing into a biopolitical regime set on trans destruction while locating profound tenderness and stubborn hope amid the rubble of an assimilationist dream. Best of all, this is a genre of hope unequivocally out for blood and prepared for trans vengeance: “by the wires that connect us, we will string them up.” 

—[sarah] Cavar, author of Failure to Comply and Differential Diagnosis

Nora Hikari (AKA The Wires System, AKA Sizhen/The Sizhen System/Sizhens) (she/hers) is a Chinese and Japanese transgender hybrid-poet, artist, music producer, programmer, ex-Twitch-streamer, recovering blogger, outsider-YouTuber, renegade gender theorist, and plural system. Her poetry has been featured in such venues as: Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, Palette Poetry, Foglifter, The Journal, The Washington Square Review, and others. She was a 2022 Lambda Literary Fellow and a 2022 reader at the Dodge Poetry Festival. Her first full length collection, Still My Father’s Son, was published in 2025 with Sundress Publications. THE MOST HOLY DAY OF THE TRANSSEXUAL CALENDAR is her second book. Her political-theoretical work can be found online at substack.com/@thesizhensystem and on her general landing page at sizhens.bot. She currently lives in West Philadelphia with her wife, Hannah, and their cat, Compact Disc.