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

Outside of the exhibit, four thousand shipwrecked girls are building their castaway huts
with the shells of my heart. By night they sweat coolly. Hear how their throats contract
with each gorgeous sip of water. Such a liminal ache. But you can’t touch them. They
wouldn’t want your willowy adulation, the way you search their irises for the future you.
They are busy with strips of bark and conch, they are busy with the soak and weave, with
the one two three, lift, my love. The singularity of their beautifying this place. When the
exhibit is finished, they will walk through their warm doorways and stay there. They will
become bodies of history. Kneel on the sand, prayer. Look at what they are making of our
wreckage.

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.