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).

are you a boy or a girl, her niece asks,
and I turn to smoke,

watch the wilted / sun

                                                                  gallop / from the trees

planted / on my chin

                                                                  my body / a vortex

my body / an echo

                                                                 my body / set out

in the lake / a tomb

                                                                 of chest / hair and broken

teeth / her voice / a shower

                                                                of pebbles / before the wind

puts on / a dress

                                                                and carries my breasts / out         to sea

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.