The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Eve and All the Wrong Men by Aviya Kushner

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jordi Alonso, is from Eve and All the Wrong Men by Aviya Kushner, released by dancing girl press & studio in 2019.

EDUCATION

I want to learn from the water,
from how it moves and lies still,
for the briefest moment,
an illusion, like human life,
never going in the direction
it looks like it is going.
I want to learn from the water
to always move until it dries,
felled by the sun. I want to be
what was here before humans
were, so help me, I want to live
for a few minutes as heaven,
earth, water, welter and waste,
I want to forget for a minute
that I was born woman,
that I was taught I had no choice
but to inherit Eve’s path on earth.

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking home in New York. She is the author of Wolf Lamb Bomb (Orison Books, June 2021), The Grammar of God (Spiegel & Grau / Penguin Random House 2015), and the chapbook Eve and All the Wrong Men (Dancing Girl Press, 2019). She is The Forward‘s language columnist and an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Jordi Alonso holds a BA from Kenyon College, an MFA from Stony Brook University, and a PhD in English from the University of Missouri where he studied nineteenth century British literature, classical reception in the Victorian era, and ancient Greek. He will begin his studies towards an MA in Classical Studies at Columbia University in the fall. His first book, a collection of erotic poems inspired by Sappho, Honeyvoiced, was published by XOXOX Press in November of 2014. His chapbook, The Lovers’ Phrasebook was published in 2017 by Red Flag Press. He is currently writing a third book of poems based on ancient Greek divination practices at Delphi.