The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Wider than the Sky by Nancy Chen Long

Memory Hole

sitting under a willow
my mother wails
head drooped
and to this day
I let myself feel sometimes
she is instead singing
even though she is not
here hummingbirds hover overhead
around a blue glass feeder
glass over her head one day
thrown against a cedar hollowed
with holes the way she is
hollowed now
cross-legged on the grass
cutting her face
out of all of the family
photos holy holy holy
she sings who was,
and is, and evermore shall be
holding memories in her
hand holing every memory

This selection comes from Wider than the Sky, available from Diode Editions . Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Nancy Chen Long is the author of Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, as well as the chapbook Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). She is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Her work was selected as the winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award and featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Indiana Humanities. She works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division. nancychenlong.com Follow at @NancyChenLong

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.