The Wardrobe’s Best Dressd: Janeen Pergrin Rastall’s “In the Yellowed House”

Release

The surf lays out featherless wings
and sanded birch limbs,
pieces once bound by ice.
Does a wave batter debris into something better?
A woman goes to the lake.
shorts and t-shirt taunt early May,
faded welts dapple wintered flesh.
She carves the sand with a stick,
draws two names inside a heart.
In an hour the beach will be blank.
She has predicted this end,
tasted it on his menthol tongue,
felt it in each whorl and callus,
every knuckles’ edge.
When waves encroach, she snaps
a photo with her phone.
She will not stay
to see her name sucked back with the sand.

This selection comes from Janeen Pergrin Rastall’s book In the Yellowed House, available now from Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here!

Janeen Pergrin Rastall lives in Gordon, MI (population 2). She is the author of In the Yellowed House (dancing girl press 2014). Her work has appeared in several publications including: The Raleigh Review, Dunes Review, Prime Number Magazine, Atticus Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Heron Tree and The Fourth River. In 2015, she was a finalist for Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula. Wayne State University Press (2013) and Border Crossing (2014) nominated her poetry for the Pushcart Prize.

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.