The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Sally Rosen Kindred, is from Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley, released by W. W. Norton & Company in 2021.

Say the Word

To be apart, I’m told.

To be asunder.

To be a privative, negative, reversing force.

To be reached only by oaths and curses.

To have a black sheep sacrificed in my name

because I’m a god, yes,

as we are all gods on occasion.

To be bodied as I am bodied.

To be rich of earth,

which is to be chronically chthonic.

To be where the gems are—

underground.

To be Dīs. To be Dīs. To be Dīs.

To reject any pickaxe disguised as love.

Sandra Beasley is the author of Made to Explode; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Sally Rosen Kindred‘s third poetry book is Where the Wolf (Diode Editions, 2021). She is also the author of Book of Asters and No Eden, as well as three chapbooks, including Says the Forest to the Girl (Porkbelly Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online. She teaches online workshops for The Poetry Barn.