Jenna Lyons wears a white button down open
almost to her navel, a black blazer, and blue jeans.
I double-sided tape my borrowed shirt along my chest,
attempt to slick my bangs into her signature bun.
Between applying red lipstick without liner
and the twentieth bobby pin, doubt steps in, but
when I step back, my full-length mirror is a door.
When I first cut my hair above my ears at 28,
I was my seventh-grade self again, trying on
my new glasses at the optometrist in the strip mall.
That year, I feared the school vision test, knowing
I’d fail. I slipped on the pair of olive green frames
I chose and studied each leaf on the tree outside,
read every street sign, shocked that I didn’t know
what I hadn’t seen. At the party, a friend of a friend
runs her hand from my clavicles down my chest.
I don’t know how to name who I am tonight, or
how to feel this again. Search “power lesbian
fashion girl boss aesthetic” on Pinterest? Study
the futch scale and where to place myself on it?
If I add weight to either side carefully enough,
maybe I’ll never have to adjust again. Maybe
life happens in the months I put off taking
my thrifted men’s clothes to the tailor.
And the grandfathers whose workwear pants
I cuff and my fifteen-year-old self watching
makeup tutorials on YouTube are my guides,
and the portal stays open to a dimension
where the breeze never leaves my neck.

Anna Szilagyi is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. Her poems about gender, sexuality, and adolescence have appeared or are forthcoming in Banshee, Dykes and Dolls, Hooligan Mag, and Voicemail Poems, among other places. She received her MPH from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy and is also a scholar of the reality television arts and sciences. You can find her on Instagram @anna_szil and read more of her work at anna-szilagyi.com.