The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming by dezireé a. brown

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ty Raso, is from they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming by dezireé a. brown (Host Publications 2025).

Instructions for My Funeral

Don’t bury me in no tree, and don’t touch
My chin hair. Burn me with gold leaves
In my crown so they know who I am [a bad
Bitch]. Take some ashes to meld my body
In glass: go ahead, ash blunts on my rose-gold
Rim. Have two funerals: a traditional one
For my mother and a kickback
With my wife. Send anyone who wears black
Home. Cry only if you’re laughing at me
[& how funny I used to be]. Play Doechii
And Solange all night, and don’t stop
Dancing until you sweat out your hair.
Find my wife and present her gifts of gold
Butter cake, fried chicken with lemon pepper,
Trashy american tacos, and hunks of sweet corn. No
Fighting, no preaching, no pain. Plant the rest
Of me to bloom [into an overgrown
Magnolia tree]. Let me sustain the bees
Long after I’ve gone to the fluffiest place
Reserved for dead Black poets, where
There’s an endless supply
Of any kind of potatoes you can imagine.

dr. dez brown (they/he), publishing as dezireé a. brown, is a Black queer nonbinary and transmasculine Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and interdisciplinary scholar, born and raised in Flint, MI. Their debut collection of poetry, they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming, was the winner of the Joe W. Bratcher Prize and a finalist for the 2026 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Often claiming to have been born with a poem written across his chest, he spends much of his time gaming and plays a mean hand of spades. Follow them online at @deziree.the.writer.

Ty Raso (she/they) is a trans character, poet, and teacher. Her work has shared space with POETRY, Electric Literature, The Adroit Journal, Foglifter Journal, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She feels most at home near rivers, and they were a 2023-2024 and 2025-2026 Poetry Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and a 2025 Djanikian Scholar with The Adroit Journal. Her debut full-length collection, MIRROR WOULD BE A BEAUTIFUL NAME FOR A CHILD is forthcoming with Noemi Press in October 2027. You can find her on Instagram @spaghetti_utopia.