The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: She by Theadora Siranian

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from She by Theadora Siranian, released by Seven Kitchens Press in 2021.

Origin Myth, Pt. 1

There was a world before all this. A snowglobe, a halo 
of light—the woman trapped within a pulsing bell of fluorescence.

Hot and curved as a tongue, the flame that emerges from her mouth. 

The murmur she emits into an ear alluring 
as a stolen orgasm, the hiss of gas before the explosion. 

This is the world I will make for you, see 
here, beneath the birches, above the fallout shelter 

is a place where the bees don't die and we never regret our actions. 

We drink hemlock in the moonlight and cup our bodies toward 
one another against the cold. 

She tells me it’s not cannibalism, to consume ourselves. 
She turns my face toward the starshattered darkness.
 
Oh, this loveliness, this loneliness, this feverdream. 

And this perpetual version of her: luminous, blinding, 
standing in the center aisle of a convenience store the moment 

before the gallon of milk slips from her hand. 

She whispers and the world shivers, splits, detonates.

Theadora Siranian is a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets, Ghost City Review, Rust + Moth, and Atticus Review, among others. In 2013, she was a finalist for The Poet’s Billow Pangaea Prize, and in 2014 was shortlisted for both the Mississippi Review Prize and Southword’s Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Theadora received the Emerging Woman Poet Honor from Small Orange Journal. She currently lives and teaches at Nazarbayev University in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan, where she is also a poetry editor for Angime, the first trilingual literary journal in the country.