The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block (The Word Works 2025).

My Body Writes Me a Sonnet

Having coalesced around you, how I love you.
You are the one I breathe through the night for.
I take flesh in my mouth each day and chew
it into something that serves you, something more
than I can give you. I try to teach you what I know,
adopted child, about the past. The bone-bent grief
of the people who made you to survive in snow
you’ve never seen, to bare your teeth
at anyone getting too close to your kids
or your sweet, soft life. And all the times I endured
your laxatives and relaxers, I knew that you did
it to protect me, to make less of me to hate. Be sure
that I love you. And, of course, that I’ll outlive you.
And you haven’t asked, but of course, I forgive you.

Mary Block (she/her) is the author of Love from the Outer Bands (Word Works Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Nimrod International Journal, and Sonora Review, among other publications, and can be found online at Rattle, SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer—The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, a 2018 Best of the Net finalist, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Mary lives in her hometown of Miami, Florida with her spouse, her young children, and her old dachshund. She is an editor at SWWIM.

Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block (The Word Works 2025).

Panic Attack on an Airplane, With My Daughter

I start to pray but then I remember
there is no God. Philadelphia stutters
below us all in our bullet,
seatbelted, flying
inside of a cumulus hell,
hot and endless around me,
autonomic and nervous,
losing sensation, fingers taloned
around the armrest,
riding the current up and tensing
for the fall,
for the scream and the shudder
of welding, of metal kicked
through the air like a can,
like a bean, my baby,
the body I grew from a seed
strapped into this contraption,
rising and falling with me,
the mother, the maker
of this and all decisions,
wild-eyed and clawing around
for the barf bag, breathing,
the bag like a heart
pumping carbon dioxide
into my brain, getting lighter
and rising up through the holes
in my scalp and my skin,
floating over my daughter,
the vagus outline of her
in the middle seat,
next to a stranger,
tied to this thing
with its wings and fabric,
coffee and sweat suspended
in air with me, my body
below in the chair, sitting
rigid and pointless
next to my daughter,
praying to pass out,
brainless,
a primitive animal begging
to leave her young.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block (The Word Works 2025).

Never Adopt, Says the Cabdriver.

That’s not your blood.
That’s not your child.
Adopted will kill you in your sleep
with a mop handle
pressed against your neck.
Adopted will tie you up
with the strings of your own guitar.
And like his car
I’m suddenly dangerous.
Strangely intimate.
Something jumped into
without enough thought.
I’m not, to this man,
just short of a secret.
A child attempting to pass
for a real child.
A second-best.
A cuckoo in the nest.
A joke between
sitcom siblings, shorthand
for Something is wrong here.
For You don’t really belong here.

Sundress Reads: Review of Let the Moon Wobble

Ally Ang’s Let the Moon Wobble (Alice James Books, 2025) is a timely poetry collection rich with bold reclamations of life from systems designed to harm. Ang’s unapologetic poetic voice is inspiring; they announce their queerness with the power of community behind every word, writing, “queer as in death to cops and politicians! / May they live their every waking moment / afraid of what the people will do to them” (47). The defiance throughout Let the Moon Wobble is a call to action for all; Ang asserts that the world can change for the better if we can imagine it, manifest it, and celebrate ourselves for all that we are and all that we have been through.

Let the Moon Wobble is organized into three sections with “Invocation” proceeding them. This poem’s first line is the title of the entire collection, and each subsequent line begins with “Let…” Ang here invites readers into a type of prayer, a summoning of what we need to heal, to be safe, to connect with the best parts of ourselves:

“Let the basil plant flower.

Let the poets discombobulate.

Let the verbs noun. Let the nouns verb.

Let the grief howl.” (1)

As a poet myself, I love the line above about allowing writers to be inventive with language, to take so-called standard grammatical rules as mere suggestions. Ang is reaching for a world where every single thing, big or small, is safe to be as it needs to be: the basil plant, the moon, the grief. Upon reading this poem, I was reminded of Walt Whitman’s “Transpositions,” a short poem in which he similarly calls for a reversal of power dynamics, of what is wrongfully accepted without enough resistance. “Invocation” ends on a repeated call for the people to be free, a notion asserted throughout the collection.

One of the most touching poems of the collection for me is “June 23, 1982,” dedicated to Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man murdered by two white men who ended up not receiving any jail time. Ang starts the poem sweetly:

“Vincent shyly kissing his fiancée at the bar

egged on by his friends’ pillowing laughter

Vincent, face warm and aglow

after just two beers

Vincent, pulling a strand of her shiny black hair

off the sleeve of his coat and tucking it

into his breast pocket…” (18)

Words like pillowing and warm show that Vincent is safe, surrounded by loved ones and feeling loved. The small gesture of saving the hair strand, keeping it close to his heart, becomes more heartbreaking as we are guided towards the tragic end of the night. Ang foreshadows the darkness ahead for readers who have not skipped to the note section before proceeding to read “June 23, 1982” with the lines, “Vincent, mother’s only baby, assuring her / that this would be his last time going out” and how “it’s bad luck to say last time” (18). This poem serves as an elegiac ode to the life and goodness Vincent had, as well as a condemnation of the “good boys, / not the kind of men you send to jail” (19) and the racist and patriarchal systems designed to protect the few and enact violence on the many.

In their insistence on creativity, ingenuity, and joy, Ang employs a number of unique poetic forms as containers for sometimes heavy subject matter. For example, “Heartbreak Mad Libs” uses the form of the classic game to make space for possibility within a set script. Readers can fill in their own answers to categories such as “# of your lover’s hairs stuck in the shower drain,” “type of love you lacked in childhood,” and “the source of the light in your eyes” (37). Ang here is offering a tool for healing, for readers to walk into and through their own heartbreak, reaching hope on the other side. “The Truth Is” is a multiple choice poem, similarly giving readers, and themself as poet, space to explore and invite options. The truth does not need to be one thing, Ang seemingly asserts; it can change over time, it is different from person to person, etc. Other poem titles like “Quars Poetica” and “Owed to My Father’s Accent” are playful with craft words; ars poetica is queered, an ode is combined with reverence and due credit.

In the penultimate poem, “You Deserve the World,” Ang writes,

“The world has ended before,

and before and before, and for some, there was

no after. We have watched its rind cracking open

like a freshly-broken heart, and each time

we build and rebuild.” (61)

I see echoes here of Franny Choi’s The World Keeps Ending, The World Goes On, and of the afro-futurist notion that the apocalypse has already happened. Despite this reality, Ang is a part of the survival; they are a part of the continued living, full of desire, hope, joy, culture, energy, and strength. The title phrase “you deserve the world” is an affirmation that we have every right to live, to be our full selves, and to enjoy a safe world, including all of its pleasures, treasures, and wonders.

Let the Moon Wobble is a brilliant debut collection I encourage all readers of contemporary poetry to get their hands on. Ang’s words act as an invitation to incite joy, a decree of justice, a celebration of queerness, and a mastering of poetic voice amidst a large variety of form. In “The Moon, Abstracted,” Ang writes, “From Palestine / to West Papua, from Puerto Rico / to Hawai’i, from Congo to Sudan, / from the river to the sea. / … / May every / oppressed tongue know the taste / of water, honey, freedom, freedom” (10). I firmly stand with Ang in this call for freedom, safety, and nourishment for all. As Ang invokes, may we see this come to fruition in our lifetimes.

Let the Moon Wobble is available from Alice James Books

Livia, a white woman with dark brown hair and green eyes, smiles at the camera wearing a blue & white striped shirt and a silver necklace.

Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of feathering and Honey in My Hair. She is Cofounder and Managing Editor at Two Cardinals Literary. At Sundress Publications, she serves as Assistant Chapbook Editor. Livia has been awarded recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, the City of Boston, and elsewhere. Since earning her MFA in poetry, she teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level.

Meet Our New Intern: Ruoyu Wang

An East Asian, non-binary individual wearing a black KN95 mask standing next to a tree in the daylight, holding up next to their face a postcard with a cartoon stork and child drawn on it. They have short brown hair, glasses, and are wearing a green top with a greenish-gray jacket and gold pendant necklace.

I wish I could speak to a transformative, empowering journey of childhood reading, but I don’t think my relationship to creative writing really began to mean anything until I was 15. I grew up in suburban Tennessee near Knoxville and towards the end of elementary school, I moved to a suburb of Seattle. Like many other writers, my childhood had been punctuated by whatever book I was then reading, and then the next (Little House on the Prairie, or YA romances later on), but only when my relationship to poetry was complicated by workshop did creative writing emerge as something essential to me.

The summer after 10th grade, I had the opportunity to attend the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and have Logan Hoffman-Smith as my teacher, in addition to several lovely classmates. By then, I was already infatuated with writing. I obsessed over rhythm or the perfect turn of phrase; I turned in poems that I’d written about love, trauma, or loss. The workshop had been titled Troubling the Voice, and indeed, Logan urged me to interrogate my writing more sincerely. I think about their advice to me all the time: that I have to be writing about either what I either really want to talk about or what I really don’t want to talk about at all, and what I was already saying—supposedly about love and loss—was not that.

Since then, I’ve been trying to ask myself every week what compels me to write and why I keep returning to writing in the first place. I’m a freshman in college now, and one upside of such a transitional period in life is that I finally feel like I have some sort of answer.

I love stories about people who spend too much time on the internet and kids who are up to all kinds of weird, stupid stuff; I love characters who are too angry, hurt, or confused. I’m not a fiction writer quite yet but those depictions of shame and grief in others’ work informs so much about my own artistic creation, whether in poems or elsewhere. For example, reading Alexander Chee’s personal essay “The Autobiography of My Novel” or Kelly X. Hui’s short story “Iphigenia” for the first time felt life-changing. In 11th grade, I took an art history class, and I still relate one installation we learned about—Pepón Osorio’s En la barbería no se llora (No Crying Allowed in the Barbershop)—to moments in my life all the time.

Above everything else, in my own work and in engaging with others’, I’m thinking about it in the context of things like queerness, Asianness, borders/diaspora, and ongoing forces of imperialism and colonialism. Kelly X. Hui and Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong (a past Sundress intern!) are both incredible, lovely writers—who I admittedly and sentimentally see as older cousin-ish figures—and they lead their creative lives with so much astonishing dedication to the communities around them.

Like Kaylee and Kelly, I want to ask what kind of world we are building with and for each other while creating art. Another one of my friends (she’s so brilliant…) told me once, years ago, that for the process of revision, her goal is to locate the heart of a story or poem and, from there, ask how best it can be brought to the surface. That’s how I’ve tried to approach writing ever since.

More about me: I love postcards, sincere emails, bridges, shakshuka, the movie God’s Own Country, and I hope to figure out the short-story-writing thing soon.

I’m so excited to see where my time at Sundress takes me. Sundress takes so much initiative to platform underrepresented voices and create a more accessible literary community, and I’m so grateful to be able to play a part in that.

Ruoyu Wang is a writer from Seattle. Their poems appear in Sine Theta Magazine, COUNTERCLOCK, and The Shore, and have been recognized by YoungArts, The Adroit Journal, and Narrative Magazine, among others. Currently, they serve as the Founding Director of the SUNHOUSE Summer Writing Mentorship and study Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. They love linguistics, postcards, live music, and jasmine milk tea.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block (The Word Works 2025).

Diluvian Blessing

May the road rise up to meet you
when the tide defeats the town.
May you find a way
to get your kids to Georgia.
May the wind die down.
May the sun show you mercy,
the former inhabitant
of an elaborate circuit
of thermally optimized dwellings
and automobiles.
May the rain fall soft
on your broken city,
pitch black, dazzling
in its downed power lines,
volatile snakeheads
sparking and snapping,
hissing at legions
of disinterred dinosaurs,
liquefied, blooming
from the exhaust pipe
of a surrendering god
on his way to the state line,
hands at ten and two.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Language of the Wound is Love by Megha Sood

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Language of a Wound is Love by Megha Sood (FlowerSong Press 2025).

Ten Ways of Looking at Hunger

I

Stars dazzle in the ashen sky on a cold night streaming and making long traces
of hopes bouncing from one end to another, tracing a path for you to place
your wish. A wish is hunger in its infancy.

II

A simmering passion rises from the dearth of your acceptance, birthing at the
corners of your mouth. Lingering desire scorched by societal norms and you
wait to exist in a different dimension. The language of the wound is love.

III

A cold gaze on the morning of the funeral waits to gulp down the memories,
as you bury the remnants of your happiness in a warm womb of trowled earth,
whose skin is broken by the lash of overnight rains. Acceptance is a fallacy.

IV

An incessant desire to look for the likeness of the soul, as your identity sits
like a square knob in the circular opening of this godforsaken life, and your
identity is solely defined by what lies between your soft supple thighs. Love is
an elegy for acceptance.

V

An uninterrupted clacking of soft beaks, as it waits for the next morsel, pushed
down its supple throat as fledglings make their home in the oak tree in my
courtyard and I think of a thousand ways to call their hunger my own.

VI

A desire for survival as the frail scorched hands of a child hold the photo of
their bombed city, carrying the identity of a refugee, looking for a stranger’s
embrace. A single night demarcates your identity.

VII

Searching for a definition of elusive peace, as he breaks another morsel from
the dried rye bread making a constellation around his courtyard, giving
sustenance to the gray-winged visitors flocking his courtyard. A lame excuse to
fill the emptiness in his weary old heart.

VIII

A life nothing but a deluge of expectations, waiting to jump across the gushing
terrain, in a race for survival, spawning only to meet death in a run for life. A
shimming desire in the cold white eye of a salmon.

IX

An unsung, unfinished lullaby that will haunt their existence forever, as they
decide on the color of the coffin matching the dress of her doll, thinking of
ways to bring that last phantom smile to her face.

X

Hunger speaks in thousands of ways, in a language unknown to many, and
yet cleaves a soul asking for more. Making thin sluices of suffering, desire, and
loneliness, scratching a path in our existence to carry pain. A flute carved deep
to sustain melody

Megha Sood (she/her) is an award-winning Asian-American author, poet, editor, and literary activist from New Jersey. She is Literary Partner with “Life in Quarantine” at Stanford University. Her works have been supported by the National League of American Pen Women, VONA, Kundiman, Dodge Foundation, Pen Women, and Martha’s Vineyard Creative Writing Institute. Her four poetry collections include the award-winning My Body Lives Like a Threat (FlowerSong Press, 2022), My Body is not an Apology (Finishing Lines Press, 2021), Language of the Wound is Love (FlowerSong Press, 2025). She was recently inducted as an honored listee for the 125-year-old Marquis Who’s Who. A 2020 National Level Winner for the Poetry Matters Project, and a Four-Time State Level Winner for the NAMI NJ Dara Axelrod Poetry Award, Megha is a member of National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW), The Artists Forum (USA), ArtPride (NJ), and United Nations Association-US Chapter. She has also been chosen as a featured poet for the 2024 Dodge Poetry Festival. Her widely anthologized poems, essays, and other works discuss her experience as a first-generation immigrant and woman of color. Her 900++ works have been widely featured in print, online journals, public exhibits, and anthologies. Her co-edited anthology The Medusa Project and other works have been selected to be sent to the moon in 2025 as part of the historical LunarCodex Project in collaboration with NASA. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and her 14-year-old son. Find her at https://linktr.ee/meghasood.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Language of the Wound is Love by Megha Sood

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Language of a Wound is Love by Megha Sood (FlowerSong Press 2025).

Rise

Rise,
rise above the opinionated heads
on stooping shoulders of demised desires
on your sturdy legs or stilts
but rise and become the voice of the unspoken
war cry of the mute
hoarse whispers of the fallen
in the crevice of night.

Rise,
when their tongue is sliced and gutted out
and vultures are feeding on their dead entrails.
Don’t be a mute spectator
they will speak through you
like an apparition,
like a ghost in the machine,
and will beg you to stay.
Be a Massiah
ready to be burned at the stake.

Rise,
enrage their souls
buried deep in their shame
your tongue born out of fire
raising hair at the back of their neck
speaking in an unborn tongue;
like a catalyst for a revolution,
you give them a mission
a purpose,

a reason for their crestfallen souls,
a tourniquet for their bleeding wounds,
a moment to survive,
a shiny glimpse of the future.

Rise,
bedazzle them
rise like Phoenix
out of thin air
devour the stench of pointy accusations.

Rise up to see a new dawn
like the hope,
neatly tucked in the crevices
of the unbroken seed.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Language of the Wound is Love by Megha Sood

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Language of a Wound is Love by Megha Sood (FlowerSong Press 2025).

Topography of a Wound

What is the topography of a wound?

The origin and provenance of its existence
and its presence defined by its gaping mouth
by the broken semantics of love, hunger, and acceptance.

An old haggard face trying to find its identity
in a shattered mirror to salvage the possibility
of finding its crochet voices in haunting
broken cold corridors of life.

What is a vernacular of pain?

When it screams, haunts, and rattles
us in the night
trying to find flesh lodged
between its saw-edged teeth.

A ghostly presence—
This scar, this wound, has deeply etched in our souls
its haunting melody like a protracted fog in winter
bouncing off thickened concrete.
like a bullet ricocheting in the dark,
like a faint voice in the shroud of the night.

An elegy is an acceptance of the truth—
A black body in the middle of a protest
bare naked with arms splayed
pinned like a monarch
ready for the dumb menageries.

Another news making the headline
for its mindless span of a news cycle.
Prey ready to be devoured
trying to find that sliver of empathy
in the white of your eyes.
Pinning knees on the harsh concrete
as it makes deep impressions
into the hollowed past of this country
asking a bowlful of questions
in its bleary eyes.

A question laced with a deep hunger and empathy
a hunger that rises in my throat,
panic throbbing like a taut wire
devoid of its symphony.

Fear courses in my deep black veins
as the thick blue knees are pressed
a little harder than the last time.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Language of the Wound is Love by Megha Sood

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Language of a Wound is Love by Megha Sood (FlowerSong Press 2025).

How to Save a Child Fleeing War?

Based on the fact that; “More than 10.5 million people have been displaced by the
war in Ukraine. That number includes 4 million who have fled abroad, half of
whom are children.”
                                                           —The Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2022

i

Open your palms and hold gently
as if you are nursing a wounded bird left astray.
Look for places where a soul has been scarred
those deep ravines of grief slowly making their way.

ii

Gently inspect each layer of their existence,
as it has been shattered and ripped in places.
Look for scathed memories that have been fissured
seeking acceptance for a soul lost astray.

iii

Wipe their face pitted with streaming tears
as they make thin sluices–
for pain deeply carved in their heart
madly hoping for another brighter day.

iv

Unburden their soft shoulders
carrying remnants of a bombed house,
a last toy, and a crumpled family picture
they could barely save.

v

Try to lessen the ache of standing
over a mother’s grave, a day before,
which left them with the inability to voice any pain.

vi

Gently wash their grief of losing a definition of home
being branded a refugee in a span of a single day.
Comfort those soft feeble feet carrying anguish
of a thousand bleeding hearts looking for solace in a stranger’s embrace.

vii

Make sure there is no sudden noise, as minds of grief and terror
get triggered in innumerable ways. Refrain from asking questions
about leaving in the middle of the night, to an unknown place.

viii

Make sure to shower endless love and comfort
on this innocent soul whose life is paying the price
of a senseless war conceived in the devious minds
of tyrants and their greed-stricken ways.

ix

Don’t take them back to the streets
laced with the dead bodies of their loved ones
and their home now turned
into a place of pitted mass graves.

x

Try to teach the lesson of our faceless humanity
this world has to offer to a five-year-old orphan
holding a crumpled photo of their family,
in their soft supple hands, refusing to give it away.

The Sundress Blog

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block

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