The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: you stupid slut by nat raum

This selection, chosen by guest editor Jillian Fantin, is from you stupid slut by nat raum, released by Dreamy Boy Book Club in 2022.

white sangria

i learned the rules of fermentation in the summertime
while paddle-stirring the honeydew cantaloupe pineapple
greenapple dissolving into buckets of white wine and peach
schnapps. we deemed it sludge fit only for dish-pit sink
drains after five or six days dragged in and out of heat.

one august night i snapped the neck of a lower-vase pitcher
pouring sangria into glasses tableside. come memorial day,
requests trickled then flooded for this light gold peachmelon
nectar and as baltimore july drifted in with the horseflies,
i poured bucket after bucket into grates once everyone

remembered this was the wrong kind of sweet. this was
the cloying venom that stowed away under tongues to be drawn
out of crevices later, when the sun goes down and the neons
peppering the orange-cast streets shine lights paint age
on my face. the night i snapped the pitcher neck, i didn’t bleed

just then, but later and from elsewhere besides my hands. tucked
into a dim red corner bathroom stall pressed to a stranger’s body,
i became the aqua vitae. i became the sweating vase of chablis
and fruit, satin on palates and sugar sticking to hands. after ten
minutes, i am sink drain sludge. i am the wrong kind of sweet.

nat raum (b. 1996) is a disabled artist, writer, and genderless disaster from Baltimore, MD. They have a BFA in photography from Maryland Institute College of Art and are a current MFA candidate at the University of Baltimore. They are also the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and the author of you stupid slut, the abyss is staring back, random access memory, and several chapbooks and photography publications.

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.