The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Drowning in the Floating World by Meg Eden

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Erika Eckart, is from Drowning in the Floating World by Meg Eden, released by Press 53 in 2020.

Okinawa Aquarium

Framed & mounted on the wall, a dolphin’s stomach, splayed.
Inside: plastic bags, bottle caps, condoms, broken
coke bottles, tampons, lighters, dentures, toys and bubble
wands. If God cut me open with a scalpel, what

would He find inside me? My beached body,
heavy with human gospel. Removing each piece from me,
God would say: I gave you so many trees to eat from.
I might say: I felt so full—even briefly, I thought I was really filled.

Meg Eden is a 2020 Pitch Wars mentee, and winner of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature. Her work is published or forthcoming in magazines including Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO and CV2. She teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks, the novel Post-High School Reality Quest (2017), and the poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World (2020)

Erika Eckart is the author of the tyranny of heirlooms, a chapbook of interconnected prose poems (Sundress Publications, 2018). Her writing has appeared in Double Room, Agni, Quarter After Eight, Quick Fiction, Nano Fiction, Quiditty, and elsewhere. She is a High School English Teacher in Oak Park, IL where she lives with her husband and two children.