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

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Spoon

When I think of its silver shape, its arch and curve,
its shiny belly eager for my soup, I cannot help
but be excited, knowing the promise of nourishment

to come. I love its metal cold against a mound
of vanilla covered in an avalanche of chocolate syrup,
or hot with broth so laden with noodles

it’s more noodle than soup, each curvy twist
better than the last. I cannot love a plastic one.
My spoon must have permanence—surviving

and outlasting bad radio songs and difficult
skirt lengths, must be the right fit for my hand,
elegant—not too tiny, not too immense. It must

take what I want to shovel in my mouth
without being a shovel, must be more like a star,
my pleasure its only purpose. It must wait

patiently among spiky forks and treacherous
knives, knowing I will come for it once, twice,
three times a day. It must stir everything I want

and never complain. I hang it off my tongue, let
it slide down until I catch it, make it blend
what’s separate into a whole only I’ll consume.

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.