Tag: best dressed

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Karen Schubert’s “I Left My Wings On a Chair”

Karen Schubett (224x300)

The Dangers of Miso Soup

I don’t trust miso soup, she says, and ominous music begins to play in
the background as she pushes her soup away with long rust-colored
mails, miso soup sloshing innocently in its painted bowl, although,
suspiciously murky, hiding strips of seaweed. Even later, when she
tells me what she meant was I am vegetarian, and sometimes Japa-
nese restaurants stir fish paste into their miso soup, I can’t stop the
movie from playing: courageous heroine leaps from her car–escape
facilitated by her unclasped seatbelt–and then! no time to scream,
miso soup in close pursuit, she runs down the street in stilettos, flowy
sleeves billowing like smoke from a gun, miso soup closing in, white
paddle-spoon clattering.

—

This selection comes from Karen Schubert’s chapbook I Left My Wings On A Chair, available from Kent State University Press. Purchase your copy here!

Karen Schubert’s most recent chapbooks are Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press, 2014), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for the Wick Poetry Center prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PoetsArtists, The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, Best American Poetry Blog, and diode poetry journal. She was a 2013 writer-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and her poem “Autobiography” was selected by Tony Hoagland for the first annual William Dickey Memorial Broadside Contest. She is a founding member of Lit Youngstown, a new literary arts organization in Youngstown, Ohio.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Karen Schubert’s “I Left My Wings On a Chair”

Schubert-hr-193x300

Death Wish

When this Ultralight fell onto the bare tips of pines, hikers saw the
flare of yellow jacket billow like a parachute. His body arrived at the
airport in CARGO, a family comforted that He died doing what he loved.
Dearly beloved, say this, too, about me. Let me die bent ass naked over
the kitchen table, let my last words be Oh. Baby. Say, She loved that
position. Let me fall face-first into a book. Say, She died on that page.
Or eating chocolate–let the mortician wipe dark cake from my lips,
roll me into the crematorium heart-stopped and sticky.

—

This selection comes from Karen Schubert’s chapbook I Left My Wings On A Chair, available from Kent State University Press. Purchase your copy here!

Karen Schubert’s most recent chapbooks are Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press, 2014), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for the Wick Poetry Center prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PoetsArtists, The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, Best American Poetry Blog, and diode poetry journal. She was a 2013 writer-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and her poem “Autobiography” was selected by Tony Hoagland for the first annual William Dickey Memorial Broadside Contest. She is a founding member of Lit Youngstown, a new literary arts organization in Youngstown, Ohio.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Karen Schubert’s “I Left My Wings On a Chair”

Karen Schubett (224x300)

He Calls Her Etsy

The wire man springs off the metal pot filled with Spanish moss. Not
that he needs to sit, with those trellis legs upright, the effort it takes
to bend something like a knee, but he’s been with the boiled wool
woman, admiring her seams and the way her waist makes a crook. She
can’t stand on her own but she leans with grace on the glass emerald
bonsai list with sunlight that goes right through him. She absorbs the
light, has a fullness the wire man can’t stop thinking about. If she says
yes, he thinks, they will make love under the emerald tree, his sharp
edges curved in, her rippable skin warm under her heart-pocket dress.
Later he will make her a mouth.

—

This selection comes from Karen Schubert’s chapbook I Left My Wings On A Chair, available from Kent State University Press. Purchase your copy here!

Karen Schubert’s most recent chapbooks are Black Sand Beach (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming) and I Left My Wings on a Chair (Kent State Press, 2014), selected by Kathleen Flenniken for the Wick Poetry Center prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in PoetsArtists, The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, Best American Poetry Blog, and diode poetry journal. She was a 2013 writer-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and her poem “Autobiography” was selected by Tony Hoagland for the first annual William Dickey Memorial Broadside Contest. She is a founding member of Lit Youngstown, a new literary arts organization in Youngstown, Ohio.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s “The Bear Who Ate the Stars”

julia

This Is Where I Keep You

I want to make love to you
in a crowded room with staring headlights
that look like wedding flowers

and tie you up with my hair
between the blinds’ shadows
that look like grey skeleton handprints.

I want to walk with you
up and down the balustrade of our balcony
that smells like blood from Russian bricks

and hold your hand inside my ribcage
where it makes my heart move
and smell like a water birth.

Why do we hurt each other
with dull words and sharpened nails
that taste like rubbing alcohol

and then sooth the wounds
with wet bodies and swollen mouths
that taste like yesterday?

Why do we fight about the seasons
before they have a chance to change
and sound like a funeral procession?

Why can’t we ever just watch green leaves
against the windows as they catch on fire
and sound like us breathing before sleep?

You take my face in your hands
after I’ve squeezed it dry and colorless
like the coarse bark of a fallen tree

because your skin is always moist
along my eyebrow, and pressing hard
like a rutted oyster keeping safe his pearl.

You think we look more beautiful
when wrapped in water and eyes
like the silk of a peacock’s dappled tail

because then there’s no place
for me to hide and wither
like the grains of a desert mirage.

When alone, I’ll drink the sand,
or will you fill my ribcage full?

—

This selection comes from Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars, available from Split Lip Press. Purchase your copy here!

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Ph.D. program. Julia’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Guernica, and Nashville Review, among others journals. Her manuscript, The Bear Who Ate the Stars, won of Split Lip Magazine‘s Uppercut Chapbook Award, and can be purchased from Split Lip Press. Most recently, she won Burlington Book Festival Short Works Writing Contest and Spark: A Creative Anthology’s writing contest. Julia is also the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine. Find out more by visiting her website.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s “The Bear Who Ate the Stars”

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Mother Always Knows, So

I tell her, my jaw came apart, but first there was the cracking
like strikes and strikes of lightening                but there was no light
She asks if I saw blood                            No, I answer, having to recall
the naked gum line             where my teeth like even rows,
flowerless pots       cracked             and cracked again
She says, it means someone is going to die                  someone not close to you
blood would signify closeness, she adds                                   and I wonder
how to calculate proximity, the pace of death         its touch based on a lack
a reach we cannot hold                based on this dream
based on my mother         how death can come on fast
a lightening strike, so bright and far away            you have to wait to hear it
crack the air                         wait for it to pin the soul
wait for ground or its jawline              for someone’s
toothless grin to shine               and fall                           out of the bloodless sky

—

This selection comes from Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars, available from Split Lip Press. Purchase your copy here!

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Ph.D. program. Julia’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Guernica, and Nashville Review, among others journals. Her manuscript, The Bear Who Ate the Stars, won of Split Lip Magazine‘s Uppercut Chapbook Award, and can be purchased from Split Lip Press. Most recently, she won Burlington Book Festival Short Works Writing Contest and Spark: A Creative Anthology’s writing contest. Julia is also the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine. Find out more by visiting her website.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s “The Bear Who Ate the Stars”

julia

Aubade to a Husband

In the church
                     of skin
from which there is
                     no cure
for light or hip-fire
                     night-fulls,
our bodies grow
                     limbs – ghost-like,
they rise and sink:
                     the weight
of a spoon
                     disappearing.

You’re up stirring
                     coffee:
lukewarm, untasted,
                     bone-heavy
white now, and perhaps
                     we’ve had
another fight,
                     another nothing
not to talk about.
                     You’re too
tired again, too empty
                     to move close
in daylight (how to
                     remember
the feel of flesh?)
                     and I trace
the thought
                    of leaving
in a mesh pattern
                   of sun echoes
dancing
                   across your face:
glints fallen
                   from my wedding band –
sun bunnies,
                   I called them
as a child, unlearned then
                   in the art
of skin-prayer.

You haven’t
                   shaved in weeks,
but still the light
                  turns both your cheeks
to stained-glass.

—

This selection comes from Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars, available from Split Lip Press. Purchase your copy here!

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Ph.D. program. Julia’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Guernica, and Nashville Review, among others journals. Her manuscript, The Bear Who Ate the Stars, won of Split Lip Magazine‘s Uppercut Chapbook Award, and can be purchased from Split Lip Press. Most recently, she won Burlington Book Festival Short Works Writing Contest and Spark: A Creative Anthology’s writing contest. Julia is also the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine. Find out more by visiting her website.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s “The Bear Who Ate the Stars”

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Holding Another Woman’s Child

I’ve imagined him
dying in my arms:
head suspended

like the last white blossom
on a weeping cherry.
His hair would come away

slowly as petals,
his yielding body
would stiffen to dry twigs

that snap and splinter,
trying to leave roots
in my hollow abdomen,

in a red watered soil,
and I would almost hear
his plum-sized heart

shrivel down to its silent seed.
Alone now, with her son’s pulse,
his head in my hands

feels like a warm bowl of milk
filled to the brim.
My fingers cup its edges

to keep in the flood
of white light he can’t see
through red-lidded eyes

where lashes haven’t yet
sprouted, where life
stirs sleeping

under ripening skin.

 

—

This selection comes from Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars, available from Split Lip Press. Purchase your copy here!

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Ph.D. program. Julia’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Guernica, and Nashville Review, among others journals. Her manuscript, The Bear Who Ate the Stars, won of Split Lip Magazine‘s Uppercut Chapbook Award, and can be purchased from Split Lip Press. Most recently, she won Burlington Book Festival Short Works Writing Contest and Spark: A Creative Anthology’s writing contest. Julia is also the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine. Find out more by visiting her website.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressd: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s “The Bear Who Ate the Stars”

julia

The Secret to Remembering

You hold it in music, but you’re growing
deaf in your left ear and I imagine lilacs
bursting your eardrum, their purple plume
smell, their pulse, falling away from flower
to captured water, your ear holding the ebb
of perpetual ocean like a seashell.
                                                                    But in me,
it won’t stay static, and swims
from belly to throat, reaches
behind the eyes where like a child,
lost or drowning, it floats, hoping
for rescue, for a reminder, something
more tangible, more held than night,
with its citrus tinge of lemon pepper
and sea salt, more audible than its violent,
split-by-violet, seething sky.
                                                         Recall that rain.
Where did you hide it? Its sonic
boom on the skylight, the way it tried
to touch us, the way you couldn’t tell
one drop apart from another, and the way
my voice turned to weather on your hands.

—

This selection comes from Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars, available from Split Lip Press. Purchase your copy here!

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Ph.D. program. Julia’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Guernica, and Nashville Review, among others journals. Her manuscript, The Bear Who Ate the Stars, won of Split Lip Magazine‘s Uppercut Chapbook Award, and can be purchased from Split Lip Press. Most recently, she won Burlington Book Festival Short Works Writing Contest and Spark: A Creative Anthology’s writing contest. Julia is also the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine. Find out more by visiting her website.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Sarah A. Chavez’s “All Day, Talking”

sarah-a-chavez

Dear Carole, For hours, it’s been burning

a hole in my gut, the shame
of never saying thank you
twelve years ago for that fucking pizza
you bought with SSI back pay.
It tasted so good: the grease,
the sweet of the tomato sauce,
the salt from the olives prickling
my tongue – I could actually taste it.
They don’t say on those Cymbalta commercials
depression takes away taste.
Sleep, yeah, sex drive, focus, but not taste.
I never told you
how for those months, alone
in my one-bedroom apartment I tried
to eat just about anything,
but it was all so thick and waxen . . .
one night, ravenous and wretched
I tried to eat an entire loaf of bread.
Cross-legged on the kitchen floor
the light from the street lamp cast ghastly
shadows against the apartment blinds
while I took slice after slice
of Wonder Bread from the Hostess overstock
warehouse on Weldon Street and bit
into each one wanting desperately
for the next to taste
like summer,
like 1998,
like the smell of patchouli
in your room, like rain water,
like mud-stained carpet, like midnights
on the front porch,
like lying to our mothers and never getting caught.
Slice after slice – mutilated, the impression
of my teeth embossed on each one’s cottony
flesh – lay scattered
on the linoleum. I couldn’t bring myself
to swallow even the smallest
bite. Just kept spitting
slobbery hunks onto my naked lap,
into my tangled hair, until
I laid down, the floor clammy and smooth
like the palms of your hands.

 

—

This selection comes from Sarah Chavez’s chapbook All Day, Talking, available from Dancing Girl press. Purchase your copy here!

Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the chapbook, All Day, Talking published by Dancing Girl Press (2014).  She holds a PhD in English with a focus in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Luna Luna Magazine, So to Speak: Feminist Journal of Language and Art, among others. Her manuscript, This, Like So Much, was an Honorable Mention for the 2013 Quercus Review Press Poetry Book Contest. A selection from her chapbook manuscript All Day, Talking won the Susan Atefat Peckham Fellowship in 2013. She is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Sarah A. Chavez’s “All Day, Talking”

allday_1024x1024

 

Dear Carole, Yesterday it cracked

right down the middle, my red
and black swirl stone ring.
I know what you’re thinking,
but I didn’t do it on purpose.
I love that ring.

 

—

This selection comes from Sarah Chavez’s chapbook All Day, Talking, available from Dancing Girl press. Purchase your copy here!

Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the chapbook, All Day, Talking published by Dancing Girl Press (2014).  She holds a PhD in English with a focus in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Luna Luna Magazine, So to Speak: Feminist Journal of Language and Art, among others. Her manuscript, This, Like So Much, was an Honorable Mention for the 2013 Quercus Review Press Poetry Book Contest. A selection from her chapbook manuscript All Day, Talking won the Susan Atefat Peckham Fellowship in 2013. She is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.