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

San Felipe
—Cabezuela del Valle, Spain

Don’t watch the blooms make love,
the visual screams they make, incongruous,

dissonant, cantankerous spirits
cascading into cloud wisps, re-forming around

María trapped in her chapel—María,
don’t watch too closely, in summer,

the children swimming in the river,
the white houses lapping

over the river’s edge like abandoned kittens.
Don’t watch the sun picking Romanians

picking cherries; don’t hang on with your eyes,
from your hill, from this wavering ark,

marooned in your valley. I can feel your eyes boring

through walls. I know it can’t be you
slurring names into the wind.

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.