The Sonnet in Drag
She’s charismatic, mistress of the brag.
Who turns a look like hers? The highest tuck
you could have—you might say she’s enjambed. Her wig
don’t ever slip. Her lip sync’s never slack.
She struts around in five-inch heels and lines
her syllables in red lip liner. Looks
like one of Shakespeare’s girls. And boy she rhymes
like he’s inside her—thumbing through her book.
You’ll want to read like her. You’ll want to wear
hip pads beneath your quatrains. Stuff big words
in every line to burst the iamb’s brassiere.
To be Elizabethan, queen of bards.
But can you bring it like a bottom from the top—
from the title to your couplet’s death drop?
Copyright © 2025 by Chris Watkins. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 14, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Wo Chan writes in their [essay] ‘Drag Poetica’ that lyric time resembles a drag ‘moment,’ an iconic and ephemeral part of drag performance. A contemporary sonnet, like a drag show, becomes lyrically beautiful by wielding patriarchal tools to point toward this ephemerality and toward the artificial construction of beauty. ‘The Sonnet in Drag’ plays with genre conventions like iambic pentameter and a Shakespearean rhyme scheme in much the same way drag performers play with traditional beauty products and heightened beauty standards—as a form of social critique. I’ve coined this style ‘gender nonconformalist’ (formalist poetry about gender nonconforming subjects).”
—Chris Watkins
Chris Watkins
