Perry Levitch
In the weeds
I could brag: twenty years playing a girl
playing a boy playing a girl
playing a boy and I did it all
in pentameter, blindfolded,
and for fun. in fact
I proudly mis-memorized
antsy Orsino: Let me see thee in thy woman’s weeds
as Viola/Cesario: Bring me my woman’s weeds
cocky like they already knew
that garter snake is harmless, that
the line summons down nothing
but the big red drape
over and over. unmade, replayed,
unmade, replayed, unmade,
they get to keep every one of their names.
they, as canonically sexy as slipping
their skin over mine, how it
threshed me fleshless.
they promise, if you play the roles well
everyone believes you
and no one bothers you, but
if you play the roles really well
no one believes anything
and everyone wants to fuck you.
in the mornings I can’t rosemary-remember what pronouns I use in my dreams
and so what? when people ask me what I am, I am
doing it how the protagonists do it:
at the pinch of concision,
I eat my tail,
cue the curtain’s solvent of velvet
to unsolve us again.
Perry Levitch is from Washington, D.C. and lives in New York. They received a B.A. from Barnard College, where they studied English and Gender. Their poems have appeared in The Columbia Review, 4×4, and Quarto Magazine, among others. They are a Pushcart Prize nominee, and their work was selected to receive Quarto’s Poetry Prize by Jericho Brown. Currently, they are an M.F.A. student at New York University.