The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Holding my Selves Together by Margaret Rozga

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Callista Buchen, is from Holding my Selves Together by Margaret Rozga, released by Cornerstone Press in 2021.

Seasoning for Courage

And their fruit will be good to eat
and the leaves medicinal.
—Ezekiel 47:12

Taste
bile churning up
into your throat?

That’s the bitter moment before
courage Courage

itself has a wild, fresh air taste
something like the soft grey-green of sage

like cold air warming up for snowfall
like oolong tea brewed with artesian water
perhaps slightly over brewed

Before the taste
the sound
of ice melting above the tree line
of wind shifting out of the south/
southwest

Margaret Rozga’s fifth book is Holding My Selves Together: New and Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, 2021). Two of her previous books were named Outstanding Achievements in Poetry by the Wisconsin Library Association in the years of their publication. As 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, she co-edited the anthology Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems (Art Night Books, 2020) and the chapbook anthology On the Front Lines / Behind the Lines (pitymilkpress, 2021). In 2021 she served as the inaugural artist/scholar at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee at Waukesha Field Station and is currently working on a book of poems inspired by the Field Station’s ninety acres of restored prairie.

Callista Buchen is the author of the full-length collection Look Look Look (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), and the chapbooks The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Double-Mouthed (dancing girl press, 2016). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals. She is the winner of the DIAGRAM’s essay contest and the C.D Wright conference’s Emerging Writer award, and is the founder of the Carlson-Stauffer Reading Series at Franklin College.