The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Lauren Eggert-Crowe's "The Exhibit"

The exhibit is a lightning storm. You walk into it thinking you will die or learn
something. Behind each curtain is a word that feels wrong on the tongue. On this body,
see how the false tongue protrudes. No one knows why. Here is the dry cornsilk hair,
here is the nasal walnut half. Underneath the scapula, a curled child. He didn’t mean what
he said. Underneath her hair, the skull is a generous orange. Words unripen. Another
child on the chest; lengthy forms of punishment. Underneath the blue shawl, her hands
fold. Underneath those, no one has seen. Here is the release and the temporal hold,
signified by clay beads, a comb, braids of fiber. Blackened skin shines underneath the
glass but does not reflect. You assign meaning to texture. At the end of the storm you fit
the words together and they wash out in the rain.

This selection comes from Lauren Eggert-Crowe’s chapbook The Exhibit, available from Hyacinth Girl Press. Purchase your copy here!

Lauren Eggert-Crowe is the author of three poetry chapbooks: The Exhibit (Hyacinth Girl Press 2013), In the Songbird Laboratory (Dancing Girl Press 2013) and Rungs, collaboratively written with Margaret Bashaar (Grey Book Press 2015). Her writing has appeared in Sixth Finch, DIAGRAM, The Rumpus, Salon, The Millions, L.A. Review of Books, Interrupture, and Springgun, among others. She has an MFA from the University of Arizona and lives in Los Angeles. Find her at laureneggertcrowe.com or follow her on twitter @laureggertcrowe.

Jennifer Hanks is the author of the forthcoming chapbooks Prophet Fever (Hyacinth Girl Press) and The Unsteady Planet(Instar Books), a collaboration with illustrator Julie Herndon. Her work has appeared in Arcadia, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Muzzle, Menacing Hedge, PANK, and other journals. She writes an ongoing column, Disorder Reigns, for Arcadia‘s online sundries blog. She is an MFA candidate at the University of New Orleans.