The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Julie Marie Wade’s “When I Was Straight”

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WHEN I WAS STRAIGHT

A ruler was called a straight-edge

Straight talk was smart talk

straight man was funny by proxy

Sober people walked straight lines

straight face was useful for poker

Straight-laced was superior to rash

Straight As were the standard for achievement

The righteous path was called The Straight & Narrow

Good girls were always straight as an arrow

With a straight bat was the way to play sport

straight-shooter never minced words

Peter told Wendy straight on till morning

Do you follow me? Did you get it all straight?

 

This selection is from Julie Marie Wade’s chapbook When I Was Straight, available from A Midsummer Night’s PressPurchase your copy here!

Julie Marie Wade is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010; Bywater Books 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir; Without: Poems(Finishing Line Press, 2010); Small Fires: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011); Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series; and Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Books, 2013), winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize. She is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University.

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooksBlink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Stirring: A Literary CollectionGutter EloquenceArts & LettersRedactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.

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