The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Fog by Dakotah Jennifer

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Verdant

A thin, bumpy sheet of ice covers the asphalt.
Grind my heels in and see the ice pebbles make sloped mountains.
I can see the small white footprint peaks behind me.
This is how I imagine myself
Walking along, leaving mountains in my path
Cracking ice and leaving marks where I have been
Making my way safely to the landing.

As I walk the ice slowly gets thinner
And finally disappears. Only the concrete is left.
This is how I imagine myself
Slowly thinning until only the bare minimum is left.

Sometimes ice is a good thing
The Earth’s rotation tilts and suddenly, the trees shed their shields,
A sky sends down bullets of frozen oceans,
A whole new coat of fur for every weather-defying creature.
The weak die and only the wise grow back.
This is how I imagine myself
Somehow too wise to stop but too weak to grow a thicker coat.
Not strong enough to resist the weather’s impulses
But somehow not capable of dying off.

All of life is white and cold and stifling.
Ice crackles and falls from the roof
Forming a melting lump on the frozen mulch.
The sun, heating the harsh surface of the all-too-fragile ice sheets.

This is how I always imagine myself.
All I want is one new day
Where birds sing
Nothing is stuck
There is no more cold
And everything is lush and full and not hungry anymore.
verdant.

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.