[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?
Copyright © 2026 by Isa Borgeson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 23, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I was originally inspired by Ryka Aoki’s poem, ‘Before the Last Dance,’ which pointed me toward the question of how to be brave in one’s gender. I use the images in this poem to conjure honesty about how I feel my gender. I explore what my nonbinary [identity] means to me—not just within a spectrum of masc/fem, but something beyond that. This poem names my wish to arrive in a room where all my selves are present. It closes with an imagining, where I find this witnessing in the world, alive all around me.”
—Isa Borgeson
Isa Borgeson
