Welcome to Labrys, your student-run art and literature collective of Smith College.

When no one was looking, I became a man.

It wasn’t hard, just a subtle slither sideways into
another skin. These new manly bones weigh
me down, strange with rougher burdens,
but their aggressive frame supports
the loin-girded shot-glass image.
The tendons stretch,
though they pull over different words; now
I can write as men do, male poets’ elegies
to beautiful girls, bad dates, bar-room jokes,
good sex, tumbling through Steinbeck’s shadow.
This is a hard language, one I stumble over,
mumbling like a traveler on foreign soil,
uneasy with the sensation of shorthand.
But the mask will crumble eventually,
to expose the empty mouth,
rotted nose,
leaking eyes
of masculinity, for I am a woman yet
and her harlequin voice won’t be silenced
by the white bellowing of the bulls.