Pretty Handsome

Separated by five decades, excommunication and death; your image resembles me. The way

your frown, your mouth and mine hold our truth in photos because we know no masks, we wear

our truth like mad mugs in disgust for costumes poorly placed over our masculinity. Yours an

early 1900’s corset black, mine, a faux battle dress and garrison to merino wool raspberry beret,

not airborne but property of an airborne battalion in Fayette-nam, Fort Bragg, First in Flight,

North Carolina, Home of Delta Force and Robin Sage—green beret training grounds and I

wonder if you ever travelled outside our home state to see for yourself what the textbooks

neglect to mention. I wonder if you even found out there were others like us all along, hiding

under a vast array of masks and costumes, marriages and kids, or hung as witches and burned or worked to death as faggots or enemies of the state, I think that’s what the nazi’s called us but I

hope you found a way to love who you loved and that special one who loved you back knew

exactly who you were and loved you because of that who you were. Did you find a way to love yourself even when the family refused to love you back? Was your husband, father, brother an alcoholic too, were you like my living aunts, Deborah and Tracey who were too afraid to acquire

a taste for fermented hops. Somehow I doubt it. I think you drank it like I had to just to survive

the reflection of yourself—a person forced into cis-drag—a brutal conversion therapy. Did you

let your girlfriends paint your face and pull your eyebrows out at their follicles just so you could become more becoming? I hope you became what you wanted and not only what they made you.

t love smith (they/them) is a queer, trans/non-binary poet stewarding unceded Wabanaki land. they are a Stonecoast MFA Candidate and Assistant Development Director at WMPG. t is the founder of Trans Poetics Archive. The archive published Maine’s First Transgender Poetry Anthology, Monster Beauties, in May 2025. t’s poetry has been published in new words press, Island Ink, and presented on local radio shows and podcasts.