[last summer I folded my dresses into storage]

^{My lover took 48 years
to put on a lipstick and dress,
and for the rest of his life
will know what it means
to be beautiful. Believe.
 
—“Before the Last Dance,” Ryka Aoki de la Cruz}

last summer I folded my dresses into storage 
like an ungrateful child
cardboard box spilling / thigh high boots
butterfly / shoulder pads
today my body / is a country of sweatpants
gallon of flesh / demanding loose cloth
or the soft fabric / of uncle’s white tee
I wear the new dress / tita gifted me instead
transform / into sequenced coffin 
lipstick / of a vomiting house
men’s ceramic tongues / lick
at my cheetah-skirt / bare thigh
moon-shaped teeth marks

my nephew asks / if I am a sir / or ma’am now
I am doing everything / I can / to not hide
my femme / in boxes / my femme
does not know / how to hug / my boy
crushes / when I’m dressed boy too
my boy misses / my lola’s hoop earrings
gold as the Tanauan sunset

my best friends gather
along a crowded sidewalk
hook orange wires into their elbows
snap a double-dutch ceremony,
turns so fast, the concrete sings back—

what is my gender to a night sky?
my pronouns to an ocean who opens for me?