The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Ghost Moose by Margo Taft Stever

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Ghost Moose by Margo Taft Stever, released by Kattywompus Press in 2019.

Menopause

The pool they build
in the backyard resembles
a sarcophagus.

A terrier owned
by a neighborhood widower
falls in and drowns.

A frog lives in the water element.
She fishes him out in spring
to take him to a local pond.

She plays tennis with women
half her age who talk
about carpools.

A hawk drops a beheaded, half-
eaten mouse on the front walkway,
most of its entrails missing.

The wrens make a nest
in magnolias in front of her house.
The cats guard the window

inspecting the birds’ work.
Cats tremble and chirrup; wings
knock the window.

In 2019, Margo Taft Stever’s second full-length collection of poetry, Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press), a 2021 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist, and her chapbook, Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press), both appeared. In 2022, her third full-length collection, THE END OF HORSES, will be forthcoming from Broadstone Press. Her four other poetry collections include The Lunatic Ball; The Hudson Line, 2012; Frozen Spring; and Reading the Night Sky. Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines including Verse Daily, Plume, upstreet, Academy of American Poets, Poem-A-Day Blackbird, Salamander, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Cincinnati Review, Rattapallax, Webster Review, and West Branch. She is the founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and the founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. In 2021, as Adjunct Assistant Professor, she taught Poetry and Bioethics in the Bioethics Department of the Medical School at Case Western Reserve University. She also teaches poetry at Children’s Village, a residential school for at-risk children.