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

When I Fell to Earth

I was a chewed up piece of planet two gods
tried to pass from mouth to mouth and dropped

I was a kind of damaged star, broken off
from the force of their heavenly coupling

I was a bit of sport, a meteor, a ball
in a game played far above your heads

I was a misdirected ship that could not beat
my way back into the sky,

I was a painted wooden bird that could not unmake
a present of myself

I was a flood that could not find an ocean
large enough to consume me

I tried to unwake my fall, but could not find
a dreamer strong enough to take me

And each time I fell, I wept, I said, my god
from up here they look so small, so small

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.