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.

You Told Me To Check the Facts and Read the Numbers

You burn 26 calories every minute
that you spend kissing someone. It doesn’t
matter if their mouth tastes like hot chocolate,
those calories will still be lost.

And women have more taste buds
than men do, so that chocolate
is extra bitter, extra sweet.

And on earth there are roughly 265
people born every minute while
115 die. So, really each loss we feel is a
gain to someone somewhere.

Half of the people who die
at the blast of a bomb
are the ones who were trying
to make a bomb and 40% of murders
occur during arguments and both of
these statistics are sad in
different ways.

1 in 5 marriages end before the
fifth anniversary and more than 99%
of species that have ever lived,
over all of time, are extinct.

The longest kiss on record
lasted almost 31 hours. That’s 213, 900
people lost. And still we keep kissing, passing
our hearts back and forth like playing
cards, Go Fish.

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.