The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Michalle Gould’s “Resurrection Party”

How Not to Need Resurrection

Children like to play at death—
they hold their breath,
and cross their arms and shut their eyes
until they forget to be dead; then rise
from their nest of pillows and play instead
at being lost or married,
as if their state was mutable, as if, like water
they could flow or freeze or climb without a ladder
into the heavens then drop back down—
they are the first resurrectionists, they alone
understand the trick is not to try,
that once you believe in death, you must surely die

This selection comes from Michalle Gould’s book Resurrection Party, available from Silver Birch Press. Purchase your copy here!

Michalle Gould has been working on the poems that constitute this collection for almost 15 years. In that time, her poems and short stories have been published in Slate, New England Review, Poetry, The Texas Observer, and other journals. She recently moved to Los Angeles, where she is the librarian for the Art Institute of Hollywood. She is currently researching and writing a novel set in the North of England in the 1930s.

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.