The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Michelle Chan Brown's "Double Agent"

Bait

They’re dragging the Volga for bodies again.
Still the men fish.

My father says:
I wouldn’t eat anything that came out of here.

The fishermen spit into their beer.
I am a girlish shard

in their amber bottles, but
they are hardly grandfatherly.

My father says:
I wouldn’t kill anything I couldn’t eat.

Impossible to decipher the headlines,
the policemen with tender

collarbones under blue.
He’s got an eye on you.

His glossy baton flirts with the edge
of my skirt. He says: Papers.

This selection comes from Michelle Chan Brown’s book Double Agent, available from Kore Press. Purchase your copy here!

Michelle Chan Brown was born in London and grew up in Prague, Krakow, Moscow, Belgrade and Kiev. Her first book, Double Agent, was winner of the 2012 Kore First Book Award, judged by Bhanu Kapil. Her second book, Motherland, with Wolves, is forthcoming in 2015. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Cimarron Review, The Missouri Review, Witness and many other journals and anthologies. A Kundiman fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Michelle is poetry editor of Drunken Boat. She lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where she is a Fulbright scholar, at work on non-fiction and a third poetry collection.

T.A. Noonan is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently The Midway Iterations (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2015), Fall (Lucky Bastard Press, 2015), and The Ep[is]odes: a reformulation of Horace (Noctuary Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in Reunion: The Dallas Review, Menacing Hedge, LIT, West Wind Review, Ninth Letter, Phoebe, and others. A weightlifter, artist, teacher, priestess, and all-around woman of action, she is the Vice President and Associate Editor of Sundress Publications.