The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: For Daughters Who Walk Out Like Sons by Komal Mathew

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Amanda Judd, is from For Daughters Who Walk Out Like Sons by Komal Mathew, released by Zone 3 Press in 2021.

For The Shepherd Who Is Also The Path The Sun Makes In Daytime

A good shepherd is a wonder in contrapposto, an artist
mapping the Serengeti with kingdom lines.

A good shepherd angles a lion’s eye, traps gazelles
in dry fields, copies a cheetah’s spots one leg at a time.

A good shepherd does not give you stones
when you ask for toast, does not ask you to work

without a burning bush—but owns a gate, uses a gate, pulls
the weeds and leaves the wheat on an altar of choices.

A good shepherd is a prince of peace when terror finds its full echo,
a creator in the wild where a predator, providentially, becomes prey.

Komal Mathew is Gujarati-American writer from the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. A graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and Sarah Lawrence College, she is the author of For Daughters Who Walk Out Like Sons, which won the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. She lives with her family in Smyrna, Georgia, where she is the co-founding editor of Josephine Quarterly.

After a 25-year career as a paralegal, Amanda Valerie Judd returned to school to earn her AFA in Creative Writing from Normandale Community College. She is currently attending Southern New Hampshire University working to earn her BFA in Creative Writing – Poetry. In 2020, she won the Patsy Lea Core Prize for Poetry. In 2021, her poem “My Only Label” was nominated for “Best of the Net 2021.” Her work has been published or is forthcoming in PAN-O-PLY Magazine, MockingOwl Roost, Trouvaille Review, Prospectus, and Talking Stick 31.