The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Ministry of Flowers by Andrea Witzke Slot

Wardrobe Best Dressed 
This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jordi Alonso, is from The Ministry of Flowers by Andrea Witzke Slot, released by Valley Press in 2020.

Gemütlichkeit

Take from me this dove’s-egg nest
in which you can place your charms
and maybe even a dream
or two. And here. Go on. Take
this cup of mud and feathers,
a nest woven just for you.
Will you put all you carry
in its shelter? Settle close
as I ease you like a song?
Oh, I know pulsating need.
My wings, they are waiting-warm.
But these, my legs? Brittle-cold.
Naked as winter. 1e sun
draws low, as if it too asks—
Darling, let’s undress and rest,
make love on a bed from which
a hundred-year-old trunk grows.
Let’s spend the afternoon there,
consent to mischief and sin.
It’s quite easy. Just forgive.
And when dark arrives, and death
glows like light in open palms,
may what we earned in cool night’s
air, all we learned and all we
shared, find its way from bone to
wing when flesh no longer cares.

Andrea Witzke Slot is a London-based poet and fiction writer, whose work has won prizes with Able Muse and Fiction International and placed in a number of competitions in both the US and UK. Her work can be found in such places as Ambit, American Literary Review, The Southeast Review, and Stand Magazine. After teaching for many years, Andrea now lives in London where she works as a contributing artist with Fiona Lesley’s Poetry Exchange and works to capture humanity and nature in words, paints, piano and photography. Her publications include To find a new beauty (Gold Wake Press 2012) and The Ministry of Flowers (Valley Press 2020). Find her online on her website, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

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.

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