The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: No Other Rome by Heather Green

This selection, chosen by guest curator and Sundress intern Katherine DeCoste, is from No Other Rome by Heather Green, released by University of Akron Press in 2021.

The Angel is an Amalgam

For Ladrea Icaza

In winter he wore a winter beard

He was sky high in the spring
His head grew light he let down the most

Delicate line he said get in the car
& on the ride a thick red book fell

From his mouth like a lullaby
He told how you crossed that chalky line

I didn’t sleep I cried I curled
To the window on the passenger side

& just like that I remembered back
I asked him changer or destroyer?

He just narrowed his eyes and said
Forever in a wave like the pushy sound

A seashell makes then he slowed
His hand down the backs of my legs

And you know me I could not
Believe him but I was made smaller

For a time by desire I was sorry
Lad I’m sorry because all this time

I never said your name
It thundered and when the angel said

Defenestration he pushed a flat
Hand to the side & I fell down fast

Heather Green‘s poetry collection No Other Rome was released in March of 2021 (Akron Poetry Series). Her writing has appeared in Bennington Review, Everyday Genius, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. She is the translator of Tristan Tzara’s Noontimes Won (Octopus Books, 2018) and her translations of Tzara’s work have appeared in Asymptote and Poetry International, and are forthcoming in AGNI. Green is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art at George Mason University.

Katherine DeCoste is an MA student at the University of Victoria, on the stolen lands of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples and the WSANEC peoples. Their poems have appeared in Grain Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Contemporary Verse 2, and elsewhere, and their play “many hollow mercies” won the 2020 Alberta Playwriting Competition Novitiate Prize. When not writing, reading, or answering emails, you can find them baking vegan snacks and forcing their friends to play Dungeons and Dragons.