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

Self-Portrait as an Ampoule of Martyr’s Blood Buried
with Them in Their Tomb

I was sealed in flame.
A red crown burning bright
around my head. I was anointed.
Promised that I would live again.
In darkness, I waited. Like a turnip
consigned to a cellar to endure the winter.
Inside me, the blood hardened.
A strange form of calcification.
Some say to live at all is a form of martyrdom.
Any heart is an ampoule of blood
entombed inside a human body,
A vial, a closed coffin made of glass.
To open us, you must snap our necks.

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.