The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: We Know Each Other By Our Wounds by Jude Marr

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Kirsten Kowalewski, is from We Know Each Other By Our Wounds by June Marr, released by Animal Heart Press in 2020.

content warning for mention of rape

Metaphor as Privilege

home is a prison made of gingerbread: home is freefalling
through ice and fire to land among tangled
bedclothes: home is hearth-ash, a blanket of snow, a lit match

home is a shared ward in a private facility: home is a pillory
with pillows: home is where the hunt ends: a hat-stand
with a single hook: soft tissue or a hard sell

home is where your papers take you when necessary: home
is a mess of mixed intentions: less than
wanderlust, a place where caged hearts atrophy, or burst

but that’s the worst—

unless home’s a hut three day’s walk from the well
unless home’s a bomb shelter, shell-shocked and pocked
unless home is dust from a busted door, a hide where the hunt ends
unless home’s where your papers are
hearth-ash: a passport
torn, page from page—

a rape-stained mat
trash and latrines
unless home is—

a sardine boat, rudderless: a concrete underpass: a route
march toward a solitary cell—

unless home
is a muscle hard-wired for silence—

Jude Marr (they, them) is a Pushcart-nominated nonbinary poet. Jude’s first full-length collection, We Know Each Other By Our Wounds, came out from Animal Heart Press in 2020. Recent work appears in Leavings, Icefloe Press’s Work and the Anthropocene, Boats Against the Current, and Moria. Jude is currently on the masthead at SWWIM Miami and Poetry is Currency, and works as an editor with freelance clients in both the US and the UK.

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.