The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: "Gog" by Brandi George

“To Ovid, Michigan”

Cow-mother, I counted all the one-eyed cats
in town. Grandma said I’d go blind.
Did you see me on the graves? I was born dead,
took my fifth of vodka to the cemetery.
Did you hear me praying? I said
there was no god, so who was I talking to?
I’ve seen ghosts with no teeth, and I want
to escape inside their mouths.
Ovid, I’m naked almost all the time now
inside my boxy apartment. Remember
I pressed my breasts to your dirt?

This selection comes from Brandi George’s poetry collection Gog, available now from Black Lawrence Press. Purchase your copy here.

Brandi George grew up in rural Michigan. Poems from her first collection of poetry, Gog (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) appeared in Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, Columbia Poetry Review, and The Iowa Review. She has been awarded residencies at Hambidge Center for the Arts and the Hill House Institute for Sustainable Living, Art & Natural Design, and she attended the Sewanee Writer’s Conference as a Tennessee Williams Scholar. She is currently a PhD candidate and Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University.

Jane Huffman is a current MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a staff eDior for Sundress Publications. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Moon City Review, Radar Poetry, PHANTOM, Word Riot, The This Magazine, RHINO Poetry, and elsewhere in print and online. She lives in Iowa City, where she teaches literature in the University of Iowa English Department and serves on the poetry staff of The Iowa Review.