The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Her Kind by Cindy Veach

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Kirsten Kowalewski, is from Her Kind by Cindy Veach, released by CavanKerry Press in 2021.

Margaret Scott of Children Lost

Hanged, 1962

I knocked on doors. Asked 
		for coins for corn. 
				Each time I thought

I could not 
		but each time hunger 
				stole my tongue— 

Please, may I gleane corn 
		in your felld? Daniel Wycomb, you would not 
				part with any ears.

Guilt, not me, is the reason 
		that ye oxen would not goe forward: 
				but backward with the load of corn.

Look at me— 
		a widow for so long 
				I’ve forgotten his face

but not the faces 
		of every child I lost. 
				They say I lost too many

and must hang 
		for this and sundry other Acts 
				of Witchcraft.

Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal, Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore and Salamander among others. Cindy is the recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and the Samuel Allen Washington Prize. She is co-poetry editor of MER (Mom Egg Review).

Kirsten Kowalewski is the editor for online horror fiction review resource Monster Librarian. She has an MLS and a specialist certificate in school library media from Indiana University, has worked as a children’s librarian and elementary school media specialist, and is a lifelong reader.