The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: If I Could Write You a Happier Ending by Mary Warren Foulk

Wardrobe Best Dressed 
This selection, chosen by guest editor Jillian Fantin, is from If I Could Write You a Happier Ending by Mary Warren Foulk, released by dancing girl press in 2021.

With Buck Teeth. With Braces.

—after Chen Chen

With buck teeth. With braces. Without a night guard, which even now I refuse to wear in middle 
age, despite my dentist’s plea. With my parents’ glasses, oversized bottle lenses. With a Dorothy 
Hamill haircut. With clothing sewn by my mother in Lilly Pulitzer style. Without interest in 
Barbies or Lilly Pulitzer. With skinned knees and a desire to be the boy my father wanted. With 
my brother who liked pink and listening to LPs of Cher. With red hair and freckles and sunburnt 
skin. With cutoffs I still fashion from old jeans. Without models but in hindsight perhaps the 
great aunt who never married. With feelings for the girl with long brown hair from second grade,
whose name I inked across posters scattering my room. With pink grapefruits, both sour and 
sweet, dusted lightly with sugar and traces of Palm Beach, where all good WASPs originate. 
With awkward shyness. With boys chasing girls. Without ever wanting to be chased by a boy. 
With silences at the dinner table. With my college roommate. With my mother accusing me of
becoming a liberal at that school. With a move to New York, an inherited dream. With my 
brother, navigating the East Village. With hide and seek. With that girl’s electric lips on the Clit 
club dance floor. Without midnight remorse. With the morning’s battle of shame and guilt. With
coming out, going in, coming out, going in. With the towers falling in 1993, in 2001. With 
darkness and burning smoke and it will happen again and mortality. With the searching. Without 
the knowing. With Sunday dinners at the 11th street bar, my brother and I sharing stories of who 
we really were. With a tightening closet. With an anxious heart. Without him, trying to imagine a 
new world. With anger. With shattering. With fear and an honest letter to a broken family. With 
my partner in our Queens apartment. With the morning light draped across our mingled arms and
legs. With the risk of feeling again. With love and a legal marriage. With a platinum band from
Tiffany’s, engraved like my grandmother’s. With my father’s champagne toast. With our 
children, placing daisies on all their graves. With a vow to live the life my brother was denied.

Mary Warren Foulk has been published in Fjords Review, The Hollins Critic, Pine Hills Review, Palette Poetry, Silkworm, and Steam Ticket, among other publications. Her work also has appeared in (M)othering Anthology (Inanna Publications), and My Loves: A Digital Anthology of Queer Love Poems (Ghost City Press). Her chapbook, If I Could Write You a Happier Ending, was selected by dancing girl press (2021) for their annual series featuring women poets. Her manuscript Self-Portrait with Erosion was a finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Poetry Award.

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.

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