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.

Albedo

She was imminent, she was a blown-glass battleship, she pulled
the space of the room in through her fingertips, pushing back
magic, cataclysms, destruction—she spoke of the chosen
and the called-upon she told lies and the hope seared
a white hole in my skin even from the beginning
I smelled the possibilities burning away, heavy as low tide,
birds circling in the heat, spotting the light: dark, hungry hammers
to my anvil—everything was acrid like after a fire, an explosion
of nuclear breath, a snowstorm of heat: in the morning
the summertime every day season moment she brought the fire
to her lips and she consumed the sun and all of its light—
she radiated was split open in rays and it burned a hole in me,
every moment was a hole in my body—holy, holy body:
she, the spirit, and the ghost again and again
the heat an eternity, my navigator, my first lost keeper—
indescribable: the sensation of flame you suck in your lungs
for a loved one, beautiful little blond girl turned dark
                      lovely, to be feared always

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.