The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: lithopaedion by Carrie Nassif

This selection, chosen by guest editor Jillian Fantin, is from lithopaedion by Carrie Nassif, released by Finishing Line Press in 2023.

lithopaedion

borne of stone mothers
cased within 

their abdomens   we 
ancient daughters    

coil into our own 
calcified spleens    this 

is how we are safe 
from each other

too deep for a blackened needle
to pry ourselves out like a sliver

no glory in becoming such lustrous      such impervious pearls

nor incubating these 
milkglass prophecies

of how we might willfully unravel
reduce our selves to gravel to be expelled

like gallstones unmoored from frigid walls
adrift

a diasporum

as if we could make an Eden
from whatever place we claw

to be glacial stone colonists 
seeding pieces of us for the others to thaw

Carrie Nassif (she/her) is a queer poet, photographer, and clinical psychologist with a private practice in the rural Midwest. Her chapbook, lithopaedion was published by Finishing Line Press in 2023. Recent work can be found in The Comstock Review, Concision, The Gravity of the Thing, Pomona Valley Review, and Tupelo Quarterly; as well as anthologies such as Slow Lightning: Impractical Poetry, Waves: A Confluence of Woman’s Voices, a virtual anthology with AROHO Press, and forthcoming Written There: The Community of Writers Poetry Review.

Jillian A. Fantin is a writer with roots in the American South and north central England. They are a 2023 Sundress Publications Editorial Intern, a 2021 Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Poet Fellow, and a 2020 Jefferson County Memorial Project Research Fellow. With writer Joy Wilkoff, they co-founded and edit RENESME LITERARY. Jillian’s debut chapbook, A Playdough Symposium, will be released this coming summer from Ghost City Press, and more of their writing appears in American Journal of Poetry, Homology Lit, Tilted House, Spectra Poets, Barrelhouse, and poetry.onl, among others.