The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Still Life by Kimberly Ann Priest

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Genevieve Pfeiffer, is from Still Life by Kimberly Ann Priest, released by [Pank] Books in 2020.

Content warning for pedophilia

my pedophile celebrates his limbs

if he is satisfied // it is portrait by number // half-moon of pink spooning ocular greens // papyri corridors / ganglionic walls // a hemic marketplace creasing the stairway // the button of his choosing fitted with infinitesimal mouths poised to call back curtains of chrysalis and wing // butterfly houses for sale on the road to embargo // his elbow in the mouth of a wasp nest / all honey / no sting // insert one pin into the hair on a brown beetle’s back and it will tell you he is fortunate to have all his pinchers free in their sockets // half-moon of bone spooning ocular tweeze // as he sets all the silver pinheads in a cushion / only to pull them one little limb at a time

Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird, finalist for the American Best Book Awards, as well as chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place, Parrot Flower, and still life. Winner of the New American Press 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Slipstream, The Berkeley Poetry Review, EcoTheo, Borderlands and other journals. She is an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and assistant professor at Michigan State University.

Genevieve Pfeiffer is a poet, writer, and scholar. Their masters project at New York University explores ideological shifts around birth control & abortion and their intersections with nature & culture. Read more about this project at the link below.