The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: i love you and i’m not dead by Sade LaNay (fka Murphy)

Wardrobe Best Dressed


Georgia & Carolyn fling florida water with sprigs of parsley

moving from the sacred interior to displacement
surrounded being read, hardly determined as “woman”
spirits tell me secrets & I am a secret gender an open book about it

pick up your regretful face
you are stealing back (something that was stolen
from you to begin with) your body

when you are sleeping &or sleepwalking
home not home but there or to school or to find work
or to explore the place you have been but not really been

thinking about how I go to therapy
and feel bad for the therapist & is it working
I do not give myself enough credit and I̶ ̶d̶o̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶k̶n̶o̶w̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶

getting a new tattoo would fix everything
“well, men never do something they don’t expect to be rewarded for”
I want to know which makes me unfair & threatening

⁸ Georgia Douglas Johnson (Virgo, 1877-1966) Poet, playwright, activist. Her papers are in the Manuscript Division of the University
Archives at Howard University.

⁹ Carolyn M. Rodgers (Sagittarius, 1960-2010) Poet, publisher, educator. Her poems are online at the Internet Archive.

This selection comes from the book, i love you and i’m not dead, available from Argos Books.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .

Sade LaNay (fka Murphy) is a poet and artist from Houston, TX. Sade holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Pratt Institute and a BA in Studio Art and Theology from the University of Notre Dame. They are the author of ​Härte ​(Downstate Legacies, 2018) ​self portrait​ (Birds of Lace, 2018) Dream Machine​ (co•im•press, 2014) and the forthcoming ​I love you and I’m not dead​ (Argos Books). Her poems are included in the ​Bettering American Poetry​ and ​Best American Experimental Poetry​ anthologies.
 
Sarah Clark is a disabled non-binary Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly (www.anmly.org), Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series (www.betteringamericanpoetry.com) and The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She curated Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio (http://anmly.org/ap25-glitterbrain/) and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms (http://anmly.org/ap-27-indigenous-futures/), edited Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, “First Peoples, Plural.” They were co-editor of Apogee Journal‘s #NoDAPL #Still Here folio, and co-edited Apogee Journal‘s series “WE OUTLAST EMPIRE,” of work against imperialism, and “Place[meant]“, on place and meaning, and is a former Executive Board member at VIDA. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations. www.twitter.com/petitobjetb
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