The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Of the Forest by Linda Ferguson

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shlagha Borah, is from Of the Forest by Linda Ferguson, released by The Poetry Box in 2022.

Love Song 2

for my husband

							Some things I love aren’t green – 

oatmeal’s cinnamon steam 
juice of peach, single strawberry 
easy breaths of blue bedroom 
moon-gray shoes 
with laces of velvet ink 
scrape and burn of crow’s caw 
the gleam of Gram’s onyx ring 
dreamy depths of our daughter’s 
azure paintings 
and our son’s red-gold hair 
somehow spun from the straw of our genes— 

							but your voice— 

all sprouts and fronds 
and stirring seeds, laughing leaves, 
echo of bells over the hills – 
up and down and around we go 
every morning, the new, green tips 
of possibility.

A five-time Pushcart nominee, Linda Ferguson is a writer of poetry, fiction and essays. Her chapbook Of the Forest was the 2nd place winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021, and another collection, Not Me: Poems About Other Women, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2022.

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.