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

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PLAY

I feel a sudden poem coming on,
new lines that dance their way across this page
to show all other poems how it’s done,
familiar yet so comfortably strange,

so new. This poem wants to skip and run,
to act unruly, truant, underage,
skipping school to lie out in the sun,
avoiding me because I’m prone to rage

at it. But all this poem wants is fun,
and nothing I can do will keep it caged—
no threat will keep this poem quiet, stunned
by my demands. It won’t live off the stage,

not cowed, not scared, not satisfied to stay
unrecognized. Without me, it still plays.

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.