The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: A Net to Catch my Body in its Weaving by Katie Farris

This selection, chosen by Sundress intern Ryleigh Wann, is from A Net to Catch my Body in its Weaving by Katie Farris, released by Beloit Poetry Journal.

Against Loss

I don’t remember this December on the precipice
of holiday: your hair poorly cut, the pile of calico fur between
my right shoulder and your left, purring.
The year and the truck out back
both idling, idling and dying.

                                    This memory I do not have—
I would like to give it to you,
            a prophylactic against loss: just four arms and four
paws and eight legs. Just six lungs,
sending our breath to the air,
                                                            just
            the air.

Katie Farris’s work appears in American Poetry Review, Granta, The Nation, and Poetry, and has been commissioned by MoMA. She is the author of the chapbook A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won the 2020 Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal, and boysgirls, a hybrid-form book, as well as co-translator of many books of poetry. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University. She is currently Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books, 2023) is her first book of poems.

Ryleigh Wann is an MFA poetry candidate at UNC Wilmington. Her past experiences include reading poetry for Ecotone, editing with Lookout Books, teaching creative writing, and working for the Parks and Recreation Department in Michigan. Her writing can be found in Rejection Letters, Flypaper Lit, and Kissing Dynamite Poetry, among others.