This selection is from Mary McMyne’s chapbook, Wolf Skin.
Estate Sale
Her clothes do not fit me.
She was wire thin, a mannequin.
I have no brothers and sisters.
Seven black coats sway in the wind.
I’ll keep the spectacles she died in,
her favorite nightgown. But everything else,
I tell the husband I married late in life, has to go.
On the card table, brooches, necklaces,
faux pearls, an antique pin.
The cold clear clatter of nickels.
My breath puffs cold in the November air.
Sell it all, I tell the husband I married late in life
after I’ve forgotten everything she ever told me.
Seven black coats sway in the end, then fly away.
—
This selection is from Mary McMyne’s chapbook, Wolf Skin, available from dancing girl press! Purchase your copy here!
Mary McMyne is the author of Wolf Skin, a chapbook (dancing girl press, 2014). She grew up in south Louisiana, studying English and creative writing at Louisiana State University before moving to the east coast to study fiction. Since earning her MFA from New York University, her poems and stories have appeared in Word Riot, Pedestal Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, New Delta Review, and many other publications. Her criticism has appeared in American Book Review. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Rhysling Award, and her fiction has won the Faulkner Prize for a Novel-in-Progress and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Promise Award. Since 2011, she has lived in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, where she is co-editor of the journal Border Crossing and an assistant professor at Lake Superior State University. Learn more at marymcmyne.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.
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