The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Fog by Dakotah Jennifer

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Ode to Sitting With My Legs Uncrossed

after Ross Gay

And sure,
It is not the way to
Be a woman or
Polite
But I do often sit
With my legs free of each other
Just to feel my skin breathe.
Or so that the blood keeps rushing to
Every limb and does not
Discriminate. Like maybe
I sit this way so that
When they find
Me,
I’m already on my way to standing
With my hands kissing
The sky.
My legs stay free
Just in case my body cannot. For
If metal sears through meat
In anything but a kitchen in Baltimore
Where my mother still wants her child kicking
Rivers will redden under
My touch. From god
I get only the wish to keep both feet on the floor
in fear of
not running and
It’s almost a reason to
smile
when I don’t strangle my legs and still call
It womanhood.

This selection comes from Fog, available from Bloof Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Shannon Wolf.

Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. She started writing poetry at eight and has loved it ever since. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, The Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year. Her first chapbook, Fog, is published with Bloof Books, and her second chapbook/zine, Safe Passage, was recently released with Radical Paper Press. Shannon Wolf is a British writer and teacher, living in Louisiana. She is currently a joint MA-MFA candidate in Poetry at McNeese State University. She is the Non-Fiction Editor of The McNeese Review and Social Media Intern for Sundress Publications. She also holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction (which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby) have appeared in The Forge and Great Weather for Media, among others. You can find her on social media @helloshanwolf.