The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Last Human Heart by Allison Joseph

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After Learning that Stanza Means “Room” in Italian

Outfit a poem as you would a home:
move in what’s difficult, what’s more serene
to rooms you wander through to make your own.

Seek words as wild as textures—chintz to chrome,
from plush velvet to slickest gabardine.
Outfit a poem as you would a home.

Lay down your remnants, hang up what you have sewn,
a cloth of words as crisp as crinoline
in rooms you wander through to make your own.

Take all your boxes, all that you’ve outgrown,
and carry those in too, those old routines.
Outfit a poem as you would a home.

Then sort through what you have, all you have known,
and fill the apt spaces, all those gaps between
those rooms you wander through to make your own.

There’s nothing in your life you must disown;
equip this house with everything you’ve seen.
Outfit a poem as you would your home—
loved rooms you wander through, then make your own.

This selection comes from The Last Human Heart, available from Diode Editions. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Leah Silvieus.

Allison Joseph lives, writes, and teaches in Carbondale, Illinois, where is she is part of the creative writing faculty at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. The author of many books and chapbooks of poetry, she is the widow of the poet and editor Jon Tribble, to whom THE LAST HUMAN HEART is dedicated. Leah Silvieus was born in South Korea and adopted to the U.S. at three-months old. She grew up in small towns in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and western Colorado. She is the author of Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press), Season of Dares (Bull City Press), Arabilis (Sundress Publications) and co-editor with Lee Herrick of the poetry anthology, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books). She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from Kundiman, The Academy of American Poets, and Fulbright and serves as a mentor on The Brooklyn Poets Bridge. A 2019-2020 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, Leah serves as a senior books editor at Hyphen magazine and an associate editor at Marginalia Review of Books. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in the Harvard Review Online, The Believer, and elsewhere.   She holds a BA from Whitworth University, an MFA from the University of Miami, and is currently an MAR candidate in Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School/Institute of Sacred Music. Prior to Yale, she spent several years traveling between New York and Florida as a yacht chief stewardess.