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Sex is awkward! Gender is confusing!
Discovering his gender and sexual identities in the lonely dungeon of the pandemic, Echo Corby found an outlet through poetry. Graduating high school as everyone was thrust into isolation, friends were hard to find and love was even harder. Loneliness made him crave connection even more, but what did he like and who would love him?
Piecing together the queer world, Corby uses comedy and anecdote to express the uncomfortable ins and awkward outs of gender, sex, love and all outrage that comes with categorization. This collection of autobiographical poetry is a form of release and expression of the vibrant emotions that so many of the LGBTQIA+ community struggle with.
Corby prides himself as an open-book. The vulnerability enclosed within these pages proves as much.
Read an Excerpt
I Think My Dog is Transgender
I think my dog might be transgender.
But how am I supposed to tell?
She lifts her leg when she pees and mounts other dogs as a display of dominance,
Maybe that means little to nothing. I know another dog and though arthritis-ridden and old, she still tries to hump me when I sit on their couch.
Again,
How to tell?
Again,
How do we know?
Again,
They are animals,
Incapable of speech,
Incapable of grasping our humanly concept of gender.
What do I mean?
*You remind me of breeding pairs*
Yes, yes. Sexuality. Sexual relationships. The concept of conception.
Sexuality is not gender,
Gender is human made.
Gender is being a man or a woman or something in between, neither or both.
It is not the same as having testicles or ovaries—As we all know.
Transgender, nonbinary, androgynous, genderqueer, gender nonconforming.
Forgive me, I’m not in mourning,
When you say sexuality used to be the same as gender.
It’s not anymore.
It’s strange and it’s complex,
It causes confusion in oneself,
And every word in every text,
That you send to your grandma, explaining what you are.
It means decision and revision
Until you’re tired.
But if animals could understand and vouch for such a thing,
And weren’t scared of it like the furry thing is when there’s a chair in the wrong spot,
Maybe my dog would want to be transgender.
We have no way of knowing, therefore animals can’t choose.
Nor can babies when they exit the womb.
“Mama,” “Dada”—they label us at their first words,
But we label them long before that.
“It’s a boy!” the father cries with a burst of blue confetti,
“It’s a girl!” to a ring of applause.
I once heard someone say, “It’s not a gender reveal, it’s a genitalia reveal.”
Before the umbilical cord is severed,
When baby is still part of surrogate,
They are labeled and they are bound.
They haven’t detached, become their own person,
Their own human,
Yet they are represented as a binary singular.
When will the detainment and constrainment of pink not pertain to a girl?
When will baby blue not bespeak to a boy?
Have a baby,
Call them “they.”
I wouldn’t have it another way,
When gender is as acidic and corrosive as it is.
We choose for our creatures and our spawn,
Because they are subhuman, sub-decision before they can talk.
The decision comes from their privates,
Just like in animals,
And they must exist as thus.
Therefore, choosing a gender besides what your reproductive organs are will always be the minority.
About the Author: 
Having started writing “seriously” as an ignorant fourteen-year-old, Echo has progressed in his writing and editing skills since finding the inspiration in middle school. His whole life, his imagination has always driven him in the creative writing and arts fields. The imagination of childhood has never left him but has evolved into something malleable to his career and tolerable in his vocabulary and sentence structure. Echo’s writing and other creative endeavors have deep relevance to his personal life, as his characters, world and themes always reflect aspects of his personality and identity in ways that may go beyond the average reader’s comprehension. Often writers add elements of themselves to their characters, as it is easier to write what we know, but Echo goes beyond that in exploring deeply sentimental to traumatic elements in his life as a form of therapy for himself and others tackling similar internal conflicts. As a trans masc, nonbinary, pansexual man discovering his identity in the middle of a pandemic, his writing also acts as a way of exploring himself deeper as well as dealing with mental health issues he has been struggling with his whole life. Writing is both deeply personal for him and also something he has always wanted to share with the world. He feels emotions are better told then hidden and that building a community is extremely important to recovery and rejuvenation.
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