The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Lee Anne Sittler's "Extremadura"

Extremadura
—Valle del Jerte, Spain

You recognize, in its voice,
your mother—

something indistinguishable,
lost and trapped

between two hills. Someone
you never met

and have known your whole life,
all at once, and you meet her

for the first time in a foreign land,
in a non-native tongue,

thousands of miles away
from your last incarnation of home.

The sun nibbles minutes
from each day: seven to ten,

six to eleven. What’s owed
must be replenished.

Love scouts Castilian rivers,
the valley’s heart

one oscillating beat;
the spawned seeks a source.

How it must feel
to be a mother: something

that should have been yours
now cries away.

This selection comes from Lee Anne Sittler’s book Extremadura, available now from Finishing Line Press. Purchase your copy here!

Lee Anne Sittler has lived in Connecticut, Tennessee, Georgia, Extremadura, and Madrid thus far; she can only guess where the next year will take her. She received her B.A. and M.F.A. degrees from The University of Georgia, and she is currently finishing two Master’s degrees: an M.A. in English from Saint Louis University-Madrid Campus, and an M.A. in Bilingual and Multicultural Education from La Universidad de Alcalá. Lee Anne is proud that her poems have appeared in some of her favorite e-lit and print journals: Right Hand Pointing, Short, Fast, & Deadly, Spillway, Versal, Court Green, The Prose-Poetry Project, and Moniker Mad. Lee Anne’s mother, Leslie Ann Gaidjunas, passed away before this chapbook was published.

Melanie Jordan‘s chapbook, Ghost Season, is available from Ropewalk Press; her work has been published in the Iowa Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poetry Southeast, Third Coast, DIAGRAM, Southeast Review, and others. She studied Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga before receiving her MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and her doctorate from the University of Houston. She currently teaches Creative Writing, literature, and composition at the University of West Georgia. Her debut collection,Hallelujah for the Ghosties, was published by Sundress in 2015.