The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Alicia Rebecca Myers’ My Seaborgium

24 Weeks

Calving: to detach or give birth.
So as to be both drift and manifold.
The splinter inside the whorl.
I pinch-test my nipples to see if they lift
away from the breast. Success! I do this
while breaking coverage of the missing plane insists
no wreckage. Imagine standing on a mountain
and trying to spot a suitcase on the ground below.
Then imagine doing it in complete darkness.
Then imagine doing it with another’s eyes fused inside you.
Not even recognizing your own body. I open my mouth to the fluted stem
of a crape myrtle. More in bloom because
it was cut back. Because it was cut. My friend
is likewise hopeful in the pare of divorce.
We’re told to detach makes birth manageable.

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This selection comes from Alicia Rebecca Myers’ chapbook My Seaborgium available now from Brain Mill Press. Purchase your copy here!

Alicia Rebecca Myers is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, The American Literary Review, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Carolina Quarterly, The Fairy Tale Review, and Day One. In February of 2014, she was awarded a residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City. A graduate of NYU’s MFA Program, she currently teaches at Wells College. You can find her online at aliciarebeccamyers.com.

Ben McClendon is a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Tennessee. He previously studied poetry at Northern Arizona University after teaching high school English for several years. His poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Yemassee, CÃ¦sura, Chariton Review, Redivider, Rattle, and elsewhere. He is currently Assistant Poetry Editor for Grist: The Journal for Writers and a poetry editor for Four Ties Lit Review. Ben lives with his husband in Knoxville.