The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: "Bindweed & Crow Poison: Small Poems of Stray Girls, Fierce Women" by Robin Turner

“crow poison”

in this telling
the girl wears
a boy’s faded plaid flannel

she wears black leggings ripped
across generous wide thighs
short shorts and muck boots metallic ink blue

she has named herself april
she is beginning again

in this telling
she has kept the crown of flowers
ditching daisies for crow poison delicate and wild

she wears their dark name
against her dark hair heavy with heat and intention
she slides on her thick eyeglasses

in this telling
she has left the old gossamer getup
down in some long-ago riverbed

let it pool there
between stones and shimmer awhile
into the last of the day’s late light

This selection comes from the micro chapbook Bindweed & Crow Poison: Small Poems of Stray Girls, Fierce Women, available from Porkbelly Press. Order your copy here. Our curator for June is Kelly Andrews.

Robin Turner lives, works, and daydreams in Dallas, Texas. She is a teaching artist in museums, youth shelters, and community centers, and serves as an online writing guide for homeschooled teens. Her work has appeared in Anima Poetry, Ilya’s Honey, Nonbinary Review, Red River Review, Referential Magazine, Friends Journal, and in numerous other print and online publications.

Kelly Lorraine Andrews‘ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, PANK, Prick of the Spindle, and Love Me, Love My Belly, among others. She is the author of the chapbooks The Fear Archives (Two of Cups Press, 2017), My Body Is a Poem I Can’t Stop Writing (forthcoming, Porkbelly Press), I Want To Eat So Many Kinds of Cake With You and Mule Skinner (both from Dancing Girl Press). She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. She coedits the online journal Pretty Owl Poetry and curates its Pittsburgh reading series. Additional information about her publications, along with a slideshow of her cats, can be found here.