The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Your Strange Fortune by Chloe N. Clark

This selection, chosen by guest curator Heather Leigh, is from Your Strange Fortune by Chloe N. Clark, released by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2019.

This piece was selected by guest curator Heather Leigh in honor of the gamer and streamer Epic Insanity, the best ally amongst some of the worst monsters. RIP 2021

Boy Meets Monster

There are so many stories
about those who go out
into the world and save it.

Of King Arthur and Beowulf
and Odysseus and all
those seventh sons of seventh sons.

What, though, of those boys
who see the monsters and think
nothing of them? Who shake

hands with devils? The ones
who look at pictures, under horrific
headlines, and think that no

one should be punished for
a single mistake? Returned
to lore, to fable, we try

to remember the boy
who fought monsters
because they were so easy

to spot.

Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Your Strange Fortune, and more. Her forthcoming books include Escaping the Body and Every Song a Vengeance. She is a founding co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph.

Heather Leigh is a queer, disabled writer and editor who has been working within Chicago’s publishing world for more than twenty years, editing poetry for the likes of Curbside Splendor and reading prose and poetry for Uncanny Magazine. She has recently began to focus on her own publication goals between semesters teaching English, writing, reading, and journalism at various midwestern community colleges. She is a three-time SAFTA fellowship recipient, a multiple resident of Firefly Farms, and most recently had a speculative horror story published in Bloodlet, an anthology by CultureCult Press. She lives in Chicago with a retired cage-fighting poet, two rescue cats names after Buffy watchers, enjoying life with the family that caught her by surprise.