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

Lorraine blesses the obsidian & rose quartz eggs

watching my blood fill the sink having the heaviest longest period uterus must be clawing its way out of my body with a grapefruit spoon these cramps tho maybe my body is angry maybe it’s going to smash my pelvis like a plate since I will not have children since I will not have sex trying not to cough, sneeze or laugh too hard && I like feeling like I can touch myself touching my insides being inside my body in a different way being disappointed with pamphlets about periods and the illustrated white girls and their pink bodies sawed down the middle to show you the clean neat insides and I did not feel clean a flat word on a sanitary sheet of paper–the information means nothing to the inside of my body, no one explained to me what it would be like to bleed and bleed; to feel myself bleed; to smell my blood in the room; to see my blood on my hands; what the inside of my vagina is supposed to feel like–questions plague me: what if my vagina is wrong? what if I cannot touch other women because I’m afraid (of doing it wrong, of being wrong, of touching myself, of more than touching myself, of touching more than myself, of touching myself the most, of touching myself wrong, of touching the wrong side of myself, of touching, of wrong)

²⁰ Lorraine Hansberry (Aries, 1930-1965) Playwright, writer, activist. Her papers are archived at the Schomburg Center for Research in
Black Culture.

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