The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Through a Grainy Landscape by Millicent Borges Accardi

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Stephanie Erdman, is from Through a Grainy Landscape by Millicent Borges Accardi, released by New Meridian Arts in 2021.

And Rage — a Pot of Orchids you Loved

from a line by Inês Fonseca Santos

Three years the tense flowers
have bloomed from the
green shoots, dormant
for months, now, the nerve curling
around inside a glass bowl as if
it were a beginner. I am
reflective and filthy, in this
house, looking inside the gaps
in the floorboards
for substance, as if this is how
life is supposed to be, a clean
floor, newly painted walls
every few years, the kitchen
scrubbed within an inch of
its life, as my mother used to say.
Spiders long gone.
We are past the newly-minted
version of marriage, all choices of
avenues we used to have
have become deserted. There are
no strata to strike matches on.
With a nod and a fixed stare,
you tell me it will always
be this way, and I fear
many times that you are right.

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of three poetry collections, including Only More So (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), Injuring Eternity, and Through a Grainy Landscape. Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright, CantoMundo, the California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Covid grant), Yaddo, Fundação Luso-Americana (Portugal), and the Barbara Deming Foundation, “Money for Women.” She lives in Topanga, California.

Stephanie L. Erdman graduated Purdue University and received her master’s degree through Indiana University. Her first poetry collection, Pyrrhonic, is available through Dos Madres Press and her second collection, Sankhara, is upcoming from Urban Farmhouse Press. Stephanie describes her style as anything with music and novelty. Stephanie lives in Northwest Indiana and works as a professor of English, editor, and professional tutor. She lives in Benton Harbor, Michigan with her dog, cat, 18 chickens, a transient partner, and persistent impostor syndrome.