The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: The Convert's Heart is Good to Eat by Melody S. Gee

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shlagha Borah, is from The Convert's Heart is Good to Eat by Melody S. Gee, released by Driftwood Press in 2022.

Learn to Walk

Fawn, an open

meadow is spread
with harm.

Every clearing stir

twitches the ear,
the follicles cup

every rustle. Your abrupt

posture prepared
to spring. A life alert.

How fast blood

must pump to stay
this ready. Your body

enters the clearing

tracked and scoped.
And yet the clover.

The goldenrod. The flush

of acorns says surrender
your alarm.

Take your cover

with you. Your spots
have not yet darkened

into hide.

Melody S. Gee is the author of The Dead in Daylight (Cooper Dillon Books, 2016) and Each Crumbling House (Perugia Press, 2010), winner of the Perugia Press Prize. She is the recipient of Kundiman poetry and fiction fellowships, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and the Robert Watson Literary Prize. Her poems, essays, and reviews appear in Commonweal Magazine, Blood Orange Review, Lantern Review, and The Rappahannock Review. She is a freelance writer and editor living in St. Louis, Missouri with her husband and daughters.

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears in Salamander, Nashville Review, Identity Theory, Longleaf Review, Variant Literature, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Associate Poetry Editor at Grist. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India.