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.

Divination

The long body of the Buick
is brown like a doe. The open
hood reveals inscrutable

innards of iron. Steam
rises from the cavity, the open
stomach of a deer on a hard

November field. Both
Buick and doe can carry
a man through winter.

My father reaches into
that space, his back
bent with effort as if

through haruspicy he will
solve the mystery of what
doesn’t work. I can’t tell

him where gears go
wrong, but I know
what stopped the doe.

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.