The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Prime Meridian by Connie Post

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Sally Rosen Kindred, is from Prime Meridian by Connie Post, released by Glass Lyre Press in 2020.

Four Miles from the Center of Town

You will find the body
at the far side of the field
past the sagging rocks
beyond the milk thistle weeds
and the crippled crows

you will need a dog
—who only responds
to sign language

you will need to search
only in fall
when the dusk
smothers the trees

you will need a rope
so you can tie yourself
to a large boulder
when the
soil caves in

you will need a small camera
so you can remember yourself
standing there in
the smoldering light you will find
the sallow, bent body
the smaller self
you
the barely thirteen-year-old
girl lying lifeless
pretending no one will find her
learning to live
in the shallow grave of silence

Connie Post served as the first Poet Laureate of Livermore, California . Her work has appeared in Calyx, River Styx, Slipstream, The American Journal of Poetry, Spoon River Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verse Daily. Her awards include the Liakoura Award, and the Crab Creek Review Poetry Award. Her first full length book Floodwater won the Lyrebird Award. Her second full length collection (also by Glass Lyre Press), Prime Meridian, was released in January 2020 and was a finalist in the Best book Awards and International Book Awards.

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.