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

“Song of the Cockroach Angel”

Before I met Cora, I dreamed
that my dead siblings grew like cucumbers
in a field. As I wandered towards
the tree of life, frogs perched on the blurry flap
of skin between my legs. Now,
instead of the otherworld, there is a baseball diamond.
Over the PA, she chants:
Forget time’s rings—dance in Rubik’s
cubes. Crow the tree’s knobby breasts.
She pitches a fastball; the crowd boos.
Aleph, the gray sky. Aleph, the sea-
green fugue. Release your enemies.
I’ve got a crew cut; my chest is the flat, white
pearl in her gut.
Go back to the field. There’s a string
to cut: a bell a body rings.

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.