The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Wilderness//Kingdom by Jory Michelson

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Wilderness//Kingdom by Jory Michelson, released by Floating Bridge Press in 2019.

Prelude

The restless build of song:
my own too-young-

to-drive, too-far-from-city
self broke out in pacing

while parents monitored
my every switched direction.

I grew brusqueful, breathless threw
myself down on couches and beds

trying to break apart the monotony
of my body—got back up to pace,

to swim in the slow circle
of adolescence. In some car

in a city out of reach, there—
someone was up to everything.

Jory Mickelson is the inaugural winner of the Evergreen Award Tour prize form Floating Bridge Press for their book Wilderness//Kingdom. Their poems have appeared in print and online in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, diode, Jubilat, The Rumpus, Vinyl Poetry, the Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals in the US, Canada, and the UK. They were awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize and have received fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho. Originally from Montana, they now live in the Pacific Northwest.