The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Her Kind by Cindy Veach

This selection, chosen by guest editor Katie Manning, is from 
Her Kind by Cindy Veach, released by CavanKerry Press in 2021.

Practice the Spell: Divorce

Load a tumbler
with ice to the brim.
Spank those fat rectangles
from your grandmother’s pastel-colored ice tray—

where her fingers stuck, so too should yours.
Add tap water until it fills the gaps
between each cube—
take it as cold as it can come

and still pass down your throat.
Repeat after me:
“Please hurt my teeth. Leak into the places
where the enamel is weak. Hurt me.”

Eight eight-ounce glasses every day
until your heart goes numb
until you can stand in front of him
and say that cold word cold.

Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal and an IPPY Silver Medalist in poetry, Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, North American Review, Salamander and elsewhere. Cindy is the recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and the Samuel Allen Washington Prize. She is poetry co-editor of MER.

Katie Manning is the author of Hereverent (Agape Editions), Tasty Other (winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award), and six chapbook collections, including How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press) and 28,065 Nights (River Glass Books). Her poem “What to Expect” was featured on the Poetry Unbound podcast, and her poems have appeared in HAD, Poet Lore, SWWIM, Stirring, Thimble, Verse Daily, and many other venues. Katie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University.