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.


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.

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.


Sundress Reads: Review of Melody Gee’s “We Carry Smoke and Paper”

In her vivid debut essay collection We Carry Smoke and Paper: Essays on Grief and Conversion (University of Iowa Press, 2024), Melody Gee grapples with inherited beliefs and traumas, reflecting that   “You can say no to the things you were taught without saying no to the people who taught you” (Gee 113). The teachings Gee references are wide-ranging, from lessons on emotional repression imparted by her parents to rigid views on God and Christianity espoused in her church. In evocative, tender, and probing essays, Gee puzzles out how to continue loving the people who still carry and pass on generational pain.

Gee follows a trail of breadcrumb memories back through her adolescence and into her childhood, arriving at an explanation for her conversion to Catholicism in adulthood. With the precision of an academic historian, Gee sifts through her past as she contemplates where her pull to the divine originated:

“It’s hard not to wonder if there was a single moment that set me on my way to becoming a person of faith. This calling surprised me with its suddenness and vigor, and then with how quickly it became an anchor in our lives…My conversion, which was always a process and never a point in time, felt new and familiar, an aspiring toward a more expansive self, but one I ultimately recognized.” (Gee 50)

This “ultimate recognition” of a new aspect of the self becomes a North Star in Gee’s journey through Catholic conversion. 

So, too, does the Church community that she names as the main reason she stays in her parish, despite the long and bureaucratic road to official conversion. The people in her church validate a long-overlooked part of herself: “Perhaps I finally recognized my spirituality once I could see it in others, in the same way I recognize myself in the features and gestures of my daughters” (Gee 71). This observation is one of many moments in this collection linking Gee’s conversion process to an exploration of family and what we pass down to our children. As an adoptee from Taiwan, Gee felt constant pressure from her Cantonese parents to show her gratitude by erasing her own desires – especially any related to learning about her birth family. Instead, she attempted to piece together her identity through the heritage her parents relayed to her inconsistently, in scraps of “smoke” and “paper”.

Torn between a desire for her child to assimilate seamlessly into America and a need to keep Chinese traditions alive, Gee’s mother served as the curator of a new kind of family history. Gee detailed her tenuous position:

“My mom is Chinese until she is not. She must do figures in her head in Cantonese; she must eat rice with every meal, fearfully appease ancestors, and call my husband American, but never herself and never me. Until she visits China after forty-five years of living in America and is told that her clothes and hair and speech and posture are all unmistakably foreign. Until she is interviewed by an adoption agency and must, against all her Chinese sensibilities, express her longing for a child.” (Gee 55)

Gee’s writing shines in these heartwrenching remembrances of her parents. She later describes one of her mother’s favorite stories: of how, during the famine caused by the Cultural Revolution in China, her mother (around age 10 at the time) cried when she had no fish to eat for dinner. Gee’s grandmother threatened to leave the home, and Gee’s mother promised to never complain again. Gee describes how her mother, re-traumatized, told this story compulsively and frenetically, in a “flood” through which a young Gee held steady. Gee inherited her mother’s trauma, internalizing as a child that “good mothers threatened their children…to keep their daughters from wanting what they cannot have” (Gee 123). Gee reckons with the lofty expectations placed upon her from a young age through her parents also wanting what they could not have: a biological child that they tried to conceive in vain for over a decade. She “…sometimes imagine[s] [her] parents sitting down to a meal they have waited fourteen years for, starved beyond hunger and unable to believe their agony will finally end” (Gee 156). Emotional and physical hunger are evocatively rendered across time and space – from the liturgies of takeout from her grandfather’s restaurant to the stress associated with feeding an entire extended family. Unmet hunger as a representation of generational immigrant trauma is one of the most memorable, and powerful, motifs of this collection.

As an adult, Gee makes sense of the trauma in a monumental loss of culture, an enormous grief of immigration, through the language of Catholicism. Specifically, the ritual of initiation welcomes one’s new self into the Catholic church, honoring the struggles of separating from what is familiar in order to return with a deeper knowledge of the self (Michael Meade; Gee 99). She writes: “My family’s immigration is a kind of incomplete initiation—unending separation compounded with the absence of a society to return to” (Gee 99). In translating her family’s generational trauma into a newly intelligible language, Gee guides the reader through her parallel journeys of healing and conversion.

I was, and am, stunned by the tenderness Gee writes with, and holds for those who have hurt her. We Carry Smoke and Paper invites us to look more closely at the ashes we have been handed, thank those who placed them in our palms, and decide, ultimately, what we would like to keep.

Order your copy today!

Catie Macauley (they/he/she) is a transmasculine aspiring poet living and working in Boston. They study Sociology, Environmental Studies, and English at Wellesley College, where they also compete on the Wellesley Whiptails frisbee team and perform with the Wellesley Shakespeare Society. A Best of the Net 2024 Nominee, his writing has appeared in brawl lit, The Wellesley News, and the Young Writer’s Project, among other publications. In their free time, Catie enjoys boxing, re-reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and buying far too many books at independent bookstores – primarily the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, where they are somehow lucky enough to work.

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).

Deciphering the Madness

I ask the night, feverishly
as it rests on the caliginous back of time
like a thick rope going through
the wide-open mouth of a blind wall
rubbing against it, leaving marks on its existence.

Like a divine mark on the forehead
after kneeling before exalted Gods
countless times.

I ask myself.

Is it ever going to be alright again?

Thinking, as I take a second glance
at the empty streets of my house
longing for the clickety-clack of footsteps
warming its thick cobbled skin.

There is a method to this madness
that I used to discover—
every morning looking outside my window
counting hurried whispers of crowds
as they move towards the station like a mass exodus.

Now I long for those sights I normally abhorred
the state of normalcy of what it was before
as the light sheepishly makes its way
through thin wooden slats of my bedroom window.

Is it ever going to be alright again?

The pinging sound of the garbage truck
backing up in an alley,
soft paws scratching as they dig through dirt
in the almost bald spot of the park
joggers clad in sweaty bodies
heaving to take in another sliver of breath.

Is it ever going to be alright again?

I look at tiny finches weaving a nest in the oak
tree outside my apartment,
as they decipher this reigning madness
carefree weaving home for their future self.

I say to myself,
It is indeed going to be alright again.


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.

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: A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios (Kelsay Books 2023).

N(t)= N ⁰ e -𝜏 ln(2))t1/2

    Curioso

What is the half-life of sodium?
              Who cares? Just apply the formula.

What is the half-life of a refrigerator?
              The day before the warrantee expires.

What is the half-life of a rock?
              Longer than you, girl.

What is the half-life of an atom?
              No one knows. If you halve it, the world will explode.

What is the half-life of a head of hair?
              About forty years, the same as teeth, eyes, and ears.

What is the half-life of chocolate?
              Two seconds. Three if it hits the floor.

What is the half-life of a memory?
              It depends on whether or not you have a picture.

What is the half-life of love?
              Forever.

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios’ (she/her) award-winning chapbook, Special Delivery, was published in 2016, her second, Empty the Ocean with a Thimble in 2021, and her third, Concerto for an Empty Frame by Kelsay Books in 2023. Nominated four times for a pushcart prize, twice for Best of Net, she has poems published in numerous anthologies and journals. A Professor Emerita from American University, she has performed as a singing artist across Europe and the United States, is editor of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast Anthology, artistic director of the Redwoods Opera and a member of international Who’s Who of Musicians. Her website is Kirkpatrick-Vreniospoet.com.

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: A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios (Kelsay Books 2023).

Communion

    Andante gracioso

My hands, heavy as prayers
divide the yolks from the whites,
the stirring spoon, a silver sigh.
It is as if I had spent the whole day
crawling through the hours.
on my hands and knees
for I cannot forget my own
son’s freshly broken body
fragile as an eggshell.

Our sorrow
beyond void and hunger
has been too deep to swallow
longed for the taste of avgolemono soup,
to feel inside the deep scour of lemon
pungent, tart, and acrid.

Yet, somehow, tonight,
this task of creating a difficult soup
works its way by accident to perfection.

Our table set for four,
contains an empty bowl,
for we agree he is with us still,
lucent in our spoons.

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios’ (she/her) award-winning chapbook, Special Delivery, was published in 2016, her second, Empty the Ocean with a Thimble in 2021, and her third, Concerto for an Empty Frame by Kelsay Books in 2023. Nominated four times for a pushcart prize, twice for Best of Net, she has poems published in numerous anthologies and journals. A Professor Emerita from American University, she has performed as a singing artist across Europe and the United States, is editor of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast Anthology, artistic director of the Redwoods Opera and a member of international Who’s Who of Musicians. Her website is Kirkpatrick-Vreniospoet.com.

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: A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios (Kelsay Books 2023).

Out of Tune

    Mesto

The E flat key on the piano is             dead
the hammer         frozen
in place unable to strike the string

I press on the ivory                 over
and          over           but no
song    only a fistful of                silence

I want to play Our Love is Here to Stay
a melody I can lean into for consolation
but with each dead E flat the       tune             thuds

with a hiccupped           gap            in the             song
as if typing love          lyrics   on  a typewriter
without          an            L

never able to say the word           Love

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios’ (she/her) award-winning chapbook, Special Delivery, was published in 2016, her second, Empty the Ocean with a Thimble in 2021, and her third, Concerto for an Empty Frame by Kelsay Books in 2023. Nominated four times for a pushcart prize, twice for Best of Net, she has poems published in numerous anthologies and journals. A Professor Emerita from American University, she has performed as a singing artist across Europe and the United States, is editor of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast Anthology, artistic director of the Redwoods Opera and a member of international Who’s Who of Musicians. Her website is Kirkpatrick-Vreniospoet.com.

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.


Sundress Reads: Review of The Birth of Undoing

Sundress Logo is black and white featuring a bespectacled sheep sitting on a stool and drinking tea while reading.
The Birth of Undoing Cover. Black background with a ripe red pomegranate and seeds laying out on a table behind "The Birth of Undoing poems" in white print.

The Birth of Undoing (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025) by Emily Patterson is an unapologetic exploration into infertility, motherhood, spirituality and nature, and survival on the quietest of days. This poetry collection moves through the body and its “failures,” through life in longing and labor, and through marriage and early motherhood. It emphasizes the importance of living an imperfect life and savoring hard moments as much as the whimsical ones. These poems beg the reader to sit with their difficult emotions and discomfort; while they don’t offer answers to the emotions that so many women will feel throughout our lives, particularly surrounding motherhood, they do make you feel heard, and maybe even less alone, as we all move through a life we cannot.

One of the collection’s central themes is infertility and the frustration, grief, and anger that accompany it. Patterson describes the heartbreak of feeling like your body has been created for one thing, reproduction, and if you can’t fulfill that purpose, constantly asking yourself: What’s wrong with me? Why is this happening? Why are my prayers being ignored? In “At the Garden Center on Mother’s Day,” Patterson writes, “See, this is what I thought it meant / to be a woman: one who bears, / not one who wants” (21). This devastating juxtaposition between bearing and wanting is crucial to the emotional turmoil the speaker feels before they turn to fertility treatment, presumably in vitro fertilization (IVF), a process that not only requires hope but also sacrifice. Sacrifice of money, time, the body itself. Even sacrifice that the speaker’s partner has to endure with her, including nightly injections. In “Night Class with Gonal-F,” Patterson describes one of these recurring evenings, writing: “On the side / street where he waits, idling in the old Jeep––second pen in / hand, still cool from the fridge. The twin bruises, blooming as / I walk back to class” (24). Through countless months of yearning for answered prayers, the speaker reveals a pregnancy is finally at hand, but despite the overwhelming joy, there is also a crippling sense of doubt. The poems in this section of the collection balance on an unknown precipice as the speaker dares to ask herself: Will my body finally give birth to the living spirit I have so long yearned for?

In the months of pregnancy, Patterson wrestles with the idea of motherhood, trying to fit herself into the image she imagined. “I am no mother / goddess, cheeks serene / as a winter haloed / in gilt,” she writes in “Self-Portrait as Not the Giantess,” continuing with,

“Like her,

I go barefoot in the late spring

heat, yet my ankles—fat and pink

among thick green—

are nothing like her slender

soles.” (32)

Despite the heart beating inside her, she still feels disconnected from the great mythology of motherhood, a concept many have grappled with for centuries.

But finally, the birth announces a new daughter into the world, complete with ten perfect fingers and toes, the speaker is sure to count. Here, we meet the title poem, “The Birth of Undoing,” which emphasizes how becoming a mother is not one singular moment during labor, but a collection of feelings, sounds, and pains, tears and joy. And how, as your daughter grows, you come to see the world through her innocent eyes and find divinity in the world’s simplest moments. It’s these moments where gratitude and awe weave themselves into the poems; gratitude for a grandmother who takes care of her brand-new grandchild on Mondays and Tuesdays, for a husband who has made the journey survivable, and for a life that took years to plan but arrived so unexpectedly. And even in these moments of bliss, depression, postpartum, or simply the dark cloud that seems to follow the speaker through life, continues to make itself known. Described in “Walking in the Rain I Wonder When Postpartum Depression Becomes Just Regular Depression,” Patterson writes about how “this grey haze fades and comes back again” (43). Still, instead of giving in to that darkness, the speaker has learned “how to walk without watching for rain. / To let go of the maps we draw for ourselves. / To let go of what we think the weather should be” (43). Speaking on this matter unapologetically is crucial to breaking the stigma around this topic and paves the way for community among new mothers.

Even while broaching the heaviest topics, Patterson grounds her metaphors in tangible things, like food and nature, throughout The Birth of Undoing. In the same way she describes Cape Elizabeth as “cups / of clam chowder, thin onion rings, cold pickle coins,” she compares faith to pomegranate seeds, like a “supple forest: every fruit ripening / just out of reach.” In “The Only Constant,” where the speaker continues to doubt their worth as a mother, she writes,

“The thing is, you forgive me constantly:

missing mittens, blackened bread,

the edge in my voice that reveals

too much, the way I am still learning

how to forgive myself.” (58)

Patterson does not glorify nor vilify motherhood; she instead embraces all of its woes and priceless moments of celebration, laying it all on the page, which is what makes this book so poignant. She allows both suffering and joy to coexist, leading to a collection that feels devastatingly honest and encourages its readers to become undone in a way that makes us realize the parts that make us whole.

The Birth of Undoing is available from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions

White woman smiles at camera in selfie format. She has brown hair and is wearing a blue denim dress.

Elizabeth “Lizzy” DiGrande is a graduate student in Emerson College’s Publishing and Writing program, where she also serves as a Transformational Leaders Fellow and Writing Assistant for the Emerson Grad Life Blog. She is on the board of Boston’s Women’s National Book Association and is passionate about amplifying women’s voices in publishing. Originally from New Jersey, she now resides in Boston and can often be found perusing the city’s public libraries or exploring new restaurants. She hopes to build a career as both a food writer and literary agent championing female-identifying authors.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios (Kelsay Books 2023).

The Oldest Living Thing in Maryland

    Con Fuoco

When I looked in the fridge, there on the rack,
lying under the dried out and left-over cheese
now pocked and dark green,
a new patterned glass colored rust,
sheened with gold, and with blue,
and over the brew, I saw hatching
within, embryonic new colors,
a red rise of skin, and the lace of new wool
in soft green mellow-marsh and gasoline yellow.

I saw liquidy fingers reach and rise
to give girth to orange-ringed circles
of a long ago peach once firm-fleshed,
with now a glowing new pattern of hair,
tin-gray blue and thin growing.
No longer resistant, but quaggy, full blown,
a new resurrection, I think of my own.
Avanti      Avanti

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios’ (she/her) award-winning chapbook, Special Delivery, was published in 2016, her second, Empty the Ocean with a Thimble in 2021, and her third, Concerto for an Empty Frame by Kelsay Books in 2023. Nominated four times for a pushcart prize, twice for Best of Net, she has poems published in numerous anthologies and journals. A Professor Emerita from American University, she has performed as a singing artist across Europe and the United States, is editor of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast Anthology, artistic director of the Redwoods Opera and a member of international Who’s Who of Musicians. Her website is Kirkpatrick-Vreniospoet.com.

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: A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios (Kelsay Books 2023).

The First Year Without You (Winter)

    Lento

the first grace of snow
I move ceremoniously
transparent  starless

among my slow fires

.

new year’s first blizzard
endingsandbeginningsblurred
sky and earth reversed

.

in last summer’s pond
under twelve layers of ice
frog hearts beat    hang on      hang on

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios’ (she/her) award-winning chapbook, Special Delivery, was published in 2016, her second, Empty the Ocean with a Thimble in 2021, and her third, Concerto for an Empty Frame by Kelsay Books in 2023. Nominated four times for a pushcart prize, twice for Best of Net, she has poems published in numerous anthologies and journals. A Professor Emerita from American University, she has performed as a singing artist across Europe and the United States, is editor of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast Anthology, artistic director of the Redwoods Opera and a member of international Who’s Who of Musicians. Her website is Kirkpatrick-Vreniospoet.com.

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: These Hollowed Bones by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from These Hollowed Bones by Amelia Díaz Ettinger (Sea Crow Press 2024).

Mystical Woodpecker

        Talthybius malomen

my binoculars are covered in pollen
—so it must be summer at last
and here comes that Woodpecker,
the mystical one,
the one i invented, for times like these

his feathers are made of steel
his beak is neither gold nor hope
pure bone on flesh
brings a sort of peace
in heat, dust, and sorrow

i saw him again today
when with trembling hands
i raised my ringing phone
that hideous Talthybius
i could not answer

i no longer listen
let time rip my bones apart
for now,
i’d rather watch my imaginary bird
through yellowed lenses

Amelia Díaz Ettinger’s (she/her) poetry and short stories have been published in anthologies, literary magazines, and periodicals. She is the author of two chapbooks and four books of poetry. She has an MS in Biology and MFA in creative writing. Her literary work is a marriage of science and her experience as an immigrant.

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.