The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: The Easy Body by Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta

Some things I need you to know before we proceed:

The dictator of the small country fashionable leftists
seem to know enough about to try to explain to me was
assassinated by a poet. In this country, the most noble
thing to be, besides a volcano or a lake, is a poet.

There is a lake in this country with freshwater sharks.

As a child, I was afraid to swim in this lake for fear of being
turned into a shark maiden, this country’s version of a
selkie. This continues to this day.

It’s widely accepted by my family living in this country,
that, due to my willful spinsterhood, upon my death, I will
turn into a cegua, and haunt the mulberry plantations,
lonely roads, bars, the Mercado Oriental, wherever
wayward husbands may be found. New form being a lusty
maiden with the head of a filly, I will be tasked with
luring men to some death by, probably boring, definitely
heteronormative, sex.

My family is from a town that, besides being recognized
as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for a tradition of
people telling the most longwinded stories while utilizing
polyvocality and masks, lays on a windy plain on an
isthmus within an isthmus, between a lake and an ocean.

This selection comes from the collection The Easy Body, available from Timeless, Infinite Light. Order your copy here. Our curator for November is M. Mack.

Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an artist who works within and between language and the visual. Raised east of the Los Angeles River, they live in San Francisco.

M. Mack is a genderqueer poet, editor, and fiber artist in Virginia. Ze is the author of Theater of Parts (Sundress Publications, 2016) and three chapbooks, most recently MINE (Big Lucks Books, forthcoming 2017). Their work has appeared in such places as cream city review, Cloud Rodeo, Rogue Agent, Menacing Hedge, and The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). Mack is a founding co-editor of Gazing Grain Press, an assistant editor for Cider Press Review, and the monster maker behind What Is Reality Plushies. Find them at mxmack.com.