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.

Animal Man

for Naoto Matsumura

I know what it feels like to be Adam:
to be the only man in a town
of animals, left to name them:

Miracle the Dog, Boss the Ostrich—
If the animals could name me,
what would I be called?

God said to Adam that man
is not meant to be alone,
but I find fellowship from the dogs

and pigs I free onto the streets.
They go in and out of houses,
wearing whatever falls on them.

Some days, they come out in old noren
partitions, suit jackets, schoolgirl dresses.
From a distance, I mistake them

for my missing neighbors:
Mr. Takei the burial man,
Mrs. Yamada at the onsen.

Only once they roll around in a muddy field
do my neighbors disappear,
replaced by animals.

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.