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

La Americana
—Cabezuela del Valle, Spain

In August, from the highway, fumes of cherry liquor made
me think of those sticky pink shots sold in nightclubs.
Back then, I thought: It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?

Now in autumn, yellows, browns, and reds navigate,
ant-like, through the hills to conquer remaining spots of
green. I discover, from a lookout point called San Felipe,
my own magnitude: I could step into the valley like it was
a tub, the Jerte River just a trickle in the drain. Today, I’m
so much bigger than the mountain of letters, postcards, and
texts I’ve sent—pebbles cast off into an abyss, no bigger
than sand grains brushed off the stern of a moving ship.

Have the months been so long?

How adventure always leads away, and never to, and my
home becomes a center around which I close in my sleep.

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.