The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Carol Guess’ “F IN”

Selection from Carol Guess’ “F IN”

                    It isn’t easy to get a ghost drunk.

                                 sugary

                                     camera

                                                                                                            doll

posing        below

                                                                                                                     a good
thing to crave

                  iris                                                                                      escaped

                                  asked for it

                                           no

spread

                                                                                                  out        at school

                                                lawn         s

                                                                                        shoplift

                                                                                                            the practice

car

                                                                           hit any curbs

                                                                                    kid

?”

                                                                                    buried                     the

creepy

                                                                                                                           guy

                                                                            ‘s       key

                                                                                                         red

sky

                                                                         fucking. It was a thing.”

“Do you want to get married?”

“Not to a boy.”

elaborate metalwork: birds                                blossoms

                                                                                                          brambles

blackberries             snapped

falling onto the grass

—

This selection is from Carol Guess’ erasure poetry book F IN, available from Noctuary Press. Purchase your copy here!

Carol Guess is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, including Darling Endangered, Doll Studies: Forensics, and Tinderbox Lawn. Forthcoming books include How To Feel Confident With Your Special Talents (co-written with Daniela Olszewska), Instructions For Staging (co-written with Kristina Marie Darling), and With Animal (co-written with Kelly Magee). She is Professor of English at Western Washington University. Follow her here: www.carolguess.blogspot.com.

Meagan Cass is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield, where she teaches courses in creative writing, independent publishing, and composition, curates the Shelterbelt reading series, and advises the campus literary journal, the Alchemist Review. Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, Hobart Web, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. Magic Helicopter Press will publish her first fiction chapbook, Range of Motion, in January 2014. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana Lafayette and an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College.