✨ Experimental Verse
The Costume Changes
Act I: The Fitting
They hand me a dress and say,
This is who you are.
I slip it on like a second skin,
smooth the fabric over hips
that aren't quite mine,
adjust the neckline,
the hemline,
the story line.
In the mirror, someone looks back—
familiar and foreign,
a character I've been rehearsing
my whole life without knowing
I was reading from a script.
Act II: The Quick Change
Backstage, between scenes,
I shed one identity for another—
thirty seconds to transform,
to step out of the daughter
and into the son,
out of the expected
and into the possible.
My hands know the choreography:
unzip, unhook, unbecome.
Zip, button, rebirth.
The audience never sees
this in-between moment,
this liminal space where I am
neither and both,
where I am most myself.
Act III: The Wardrobe Malfunction
What happens when the costume
doesn't fit anymore?
When the seams split,
the zipper breaks,
the whole careful construction
comes undone?
I stand in the wreckage of fabric,
in the honest nakedness
of not knowing which role to play,
and discover that underneath
all these borrowed clothes,
I've been wearing my own skin
all along.
Curtain Call
When the show is over,
when the audience has gone home,
I hang up the costumes one by one—
the ones that fit,
the ones that didn't,
the ones I wore to please others,
the ones I wore to please myself.
Tomorrow, I'll choose again.
Or maybe I'll walk on stage
in nothing but my name,
and let that be enough.
About the Poet
Elijah Thornwood is a nonbinary poet and performance artist whose work explores the intersections of gender, identity, and theatrical performance. Their poetry has been featured in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, and The American Poetry Review. They are the recipient of a Lambda Literary Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. "The Costume Changes" is part of their debut collection, Neither/Nor, which examines the fluidity of self through the lens of theatrical transformation. Elijah lives in Brooklyn and teaches at NYU's Gallatin School.