The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Wilderness//Kingdom by Jory Michelson
sundresspublications
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.