The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Madonna, Complex by Jen Stewart Fueston

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Renunciation

Could Mary have refused,
when it was offered her,
left her fingers
open around the gift,
releasing the weight of it
from the palm of her hand?

Could she simply have turned
when the angel startled her,
and gone about folding the clothes,
sweeping dust from corners,
baking the daily bread?

Could she have brushed it aside,
arm upraised not in fear
but release?
A wave of good-bye,
a hand blocking merely the glare
of the morning sun,
not the radiance of angels
in her kitchen.

This selection comes from Madonna, Complex, available from Cascade Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Jen Stewart Fueston is the author of Madonna, Complex (Cascade Books 2020), Latch (River Glass Books 2019) and Visitations (Finishing Line Press 2015). Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in AGNI, Thrush, Western Humanities Review, Spoon River Poetry Review and elsewhere. A native of Colorado, she has taught writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as internationally in Hungary, Turkey and Lithuania.   Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.