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. 3

From the beginning the world said: learn to love loneliness.
At any cost discover how to tell a proper lie.

It’s too late to deny I’ve created this fiction.

Here, a heart clenched tight as a fist.
The bedroom window left open and the snow

drifting in. How an open palm in the darkness

can have indeterminate intentions. A tongue, arching.

A hot mouth pressed to the place where thigh meets body.
An entire world, replete with desires and losses.

Others will always find a way to teach you about love.

Young and already filled with fear of death I built
houses in my mind, wandered weightless beneath stories

so complex I forgot to breathe, sitting in the rain dumb
with concentration until someone came and found me.

In a different version I sat for thirty years, alone and still
as stone until time and weather cracked me in half,

my broken face pressed with rapture toward the sky.

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.