The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Automotive by Ceridwen Hall

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Automotive by Ceridwen Hall, released by Finishing Line Press in 2020.

Visibility

An empty bottle rotates in the wind ahead,

then in the mirror. I too am strange

to all my previous selves, despite history,

despite patterns entrenched. Fences slip by

outside and I mistake animals for symbols:

a crow eats road kill, two horses drink

from a small pond. The grass is faded brown,

but I try to mark where the fields end,

where the hills first lift. There’s nothing exact

about transformation. Landmarks arise,

blur into memory; I will be again, surrounded

by the people who know me now because

they knew me once. A slow river doubles

the bridge—with pillars stretched across water.

Ceridwen Hall is a poet, editor, and educator from Ohio. Although she’s lived on both coasts and in the mountains, she retains a deep appreciation for the Midwest and its roads. She completed her MFA at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and her PhD at the University of Utah, where she received the Clarence Snow Fellowship and the Levis Prize in Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in Spoon River Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Pembroke Magazine, Tar River Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, and other journals.