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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed so far this year.

IN OHIO

My mother is asleep by six o’clock every evening
          although on her taxes she still checks single never married.
Most of her relationships have been ten years or more
          She falls asleep with dark cognac warm on her lips.
No man to worry about; no children to listen out for
          She has always worked on assembly.
The same thing every day is a safe life
          Love never guarantees such a luxury.
She opts out; she works to stay safe out the way
          Her work clothes are draped across a chair.
A fresh coffee filter sits readily near the pot
          She takes her coffee black.
Calls me fancy for adding almond milk and sugar to mine—
          All her daughters are grown with homes of their own, she says.
As a proud accomplishment
          None of us were teenage mothers.
We went to school
          Sometimes to church.
Motherhood is a war she won
          We knew how to lock the doors and windows.
We knew how to tell men at the gas station to fuck off
           We knew how to earn a living by eighteen.
We knew why we had to leave by eighteen—
           At some point, they called us lucky.
And maybe I felt lucky for a while
           I made it without a father, I say this to strangers.
As a proud accomplishment
          When my daughter is born, and I am grown enough
To be a mother
           I fall asleep when the city is useless.
When all the bars and clubs close down nearing the witching hours—
           Times I used to sneak back into the house.
Back when I wasn’t grown, and my mother had children
          Wild, loose girls to listen out for.

Daughters she would curse for coming in late
          Daughters she raised to know better.
Daughters she raised to be grown enough



          To tell men at the gas station to fuck off.
Daughters she raised like sons—
          And when I close my eyes, I see the man.
Dark and toxic like the one my mother drinks alone.
          A man who bought me a drink one night.
In exchange for a baby by morning
          I can see him standing in a courtroom of shadows.
Telling a judge I am no mother to his child
          I am a wild, loose girl from Ohio on the run.
With a baby that is his
          I am unwed, alone.
My last year’s taxes I check, single never married
          Emotionally unstable—or does he call me dangerous?
Is there a difference?
          I leave Texas fleetingly like I had been gone
On a bad date     all night

          My mother is asleep when my plane lands.
At the only airport in town—my baby
          is tied to my chest like a pacemaker.
The day before I laid my clothes out
          like the first day of school.
I sit an empty coffee mug by the machine.
          My important documents: the ones that say I am human woman.
Naming the generation that has come from my body and is legally mine
          I worry about the man sleeping next to me.
The child who binds us for the next 18 years to life
          is asleep across the room in her bassinet.
She is soon to become fatherless in hours
          soon to be the daughter my mother taught me to be.
The one I vow to teach to know better
          To tell men at the gas station to fuck off.
Maybe not verbally—but just with her eyes
          That morning, I drink my coffee black.
I am no longer fancy with a baby
           I put on leggings and a t-shirt.
A jacket because I am always in winter
          Someone tells me the best way to leave an abuser—
Is like a burglar, jumping inside a getaway cloud
          The sun is out the day I take off.
Nearing the hour



          My mother probably takes her lunch break.
I run into the hot sun bright like death
          I wake up on the other side of myself.
The girl from Ohio I left behind some time ago
          I call my mother at the airport.
Knowing better than to knock at her door at this hour when
          Only women who aren’t real women are outside.
She does not answer the phone when I call—
          No man to worry about; no child to listen out for.

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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed so far this year.

in today’s terms

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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed so far this year.

WEDDING GIFT

The print that began the ending of my marriage was so
gorgeous, I’d forgotten how gorgeous it was in real life, laid
out on the examination table, as the framer and I took measure
of what lay before us—the paper itself and the textures, alive
and breathing. The whale inside it shook a bit and swished,
but it might have been the waves brushing against a stone, or
it might not have been water at all, just strange birds in the
Negev against a blue and white sky about to blink off without
the fanfare of sunset. Tears burst when my fingertips brushed
it. The framer, also, cleared his throat upon sliding it from
its canister and unfolding it across the table. He touched the
ragged edges and caressed the signature—print 1 of 12, he
whispered. Every time he touched it he asked permission, as
if we were lovers—may I remove it from its box? May I spread
it out? The framer is going to Monte Negro for a week, so
he’ll have it ready on Friday, Sept. 20. Once home, I undress
and wait in bed, the sheets and covers indeterminate colors of
green, for the dream to return to the point it left off, the last
time I touched it. Then I was swimming all night through
the air/sand/water that was the page of the print, and while
nothing in particular happened, it was the nothing particular
that happens when you walk on a strange and beautiful
landscape for the first time. Or the nothing particular that
ends a marriage. Then every leaf and every water drop and
every strange flower is a happening.

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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed so far this year.

Protections

Against the whir of my treadmill
     a shot rings out

and a wolf is gunned down—O-Six,
     they named her,

numinous alpha female
     of Yellowstone National Park

because she survived
     solo.

Even the commentator says
     this was unusual

and dangerous; yet she was beloved
     for acuity

and beauty, face like an owl mask against
     snow white.

I listen as the hunter celebrates
     his kill, the documentary

rolling. My treadmill
     rolling.

They had lifted the ban on hunting
     wolves that year—

endangered status just long enough
     for a female

to become her own pack, survive, surpass
     the males of her kind.

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This week, Managing Editor Merrick Sloane shares a new selection from each of their 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed so far this year.

You Could Be Pretty

When my breasts betrayed me the first time
             by arriving before I was ten,
my stepmother forced me to wear
             lacey bras and satin underwear,
telling me not to be a whore as she threw me
             at any boy or grown man who looked,
hoping for a shotgun marriage.

So I stopped wearing dresses outside
             of church and at weddings. I stopped
wanting to be pretty. Wore thrifted
             Timberland boots and large shirts,
carried knives.

I treated makeup like an exotic curiosity
              and yes, it makes me pretty.
Creates someone new

              and vulnerable, someone who looks
safe. Instead
              I learned to throw a punch
without breaking my wrists. Learned to throw
              grown men over my hip
like fussy children. Developed an early eye
              for tight groupings, center mass.



Learned to hold a rifle as close
               as a lover to my shoulder, and open
my bones to each bullet’s shockwave,
               to the unrelenting
hunger of the world.

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When least expected,

magic twines legs like

a cat. Or was it always

here, and by averting

eyes from the shadow,

I missed its shine? Or

did A strike it from my

flint-like limbs? Either

way,²¹ its song fills every

room, and I only have

to notice what catches

in my throat when

I lift voice in return.

____________
21“It is not that something different is seen, but that one
sees differently. It is as though the spatial act of seeing were
changed by a new dimension,” Carl Jung.

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