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.

Sidelong Catastrophe

I’m not sure who the sky is
when it’s not the sky

but I think I know this river
was once a beautiful woman

viewed from above all bodies
of water look like someone

you once loved and the color
of the trees only matters

when there are trees at all
and sometimes I imagine

that we can solve everything
design cities that fit into

the Earth instead of making
the Earth fit into them

but mostly we sit at drawing
boards and paint scenes

of decay because that is what
we know and sometimes I think

I can see the sky but
it might just be a person

and I’ll miss the sun most
when the clouds weep the ghosts

of rivers for days on end

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.