The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: "Motherlover" by Ginger Ko

“Treespeak”

Everything we think to do, we do.

I told you I brewed up a fire, I set the sidewalk boiling, and soon all the
cement panels were askew.

I actually don’t care for your flowers, they’re not ribbons at all, and I
don’t like to think of a sea of privates agog around me.

Who says we feel more than the wind in our uppermost, we look
through our roots, we crowd into dirt as hard as rock and uplift skeletons.

It’s an imposition to bring myself to meet the springy bulges of your
staring, your recognition.

So are you going to save me?

Let’s not glorify the outdoors anymore, it wouldn’t be so bad to live
inside a well-windowed house.

I have felt so much with these crusts.

The shadows of your neighbors look much like your own: admit it.

This selection comes from Ginger Ko’s poetry collection Motherlover, available now from Bloof Books. Purchase your copy here.

Ginger Ko is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books), and the chapbooks Inherit (Bloof Books) and Comorbid (Lark Books). Sidebrow will be publishing her second, currently unnamed full collection of poetry. Ginger is currently a PhD student at the University of Georgia’s creative writing program. You can find her online at www.gingerko.com.

Staci R. Schoenfeld is a recipient of 2015 NEA Fellowship for Poetry, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and residencies from the Ragdale Foundation and Albee Foundation. She is a PhD student at University of South Dakota, assistant editor for poetry at South Dakota Review, and an assistant editor at Sundress Publications. Recent and forthcoming publications include poems in Mid-American Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Room Magazine, fiction in Gingerbread House Literary Magazine, and non-fiction in The Manifest Station.