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The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Tortillera by Caridad Moro-Gronlier

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This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from Tortillera by Caridad Moro-Gronlier, released by Texas A&M University Press in 2021.

Grilled

               For Sean
When you asked me why I loved you early into the morning
of a fight that had raged all night, I couldn’t answer, so I 
        asked you
for a grilled-cheese sandwich, a request that left you slack-
jawed and baffled as if I’d asked for a divorce instead.

I was the mouthy one but could not explain
what I saw in those sandwiches—the delicate balance
of starch and protein, white bread that braved direct heat
for the sake of cheese so flimsy it was dependent

on a framework of flour to keep it from burning
on the unforgiving surface of a wounded frying pan.
I thought it settled when you gave me what I wanted,
toasted gold streaming light on all the damage we’d done.

I never did tell you how I felt,
just chewed it all up, the love
you served on our best china.
Never once offered you a bite.

Caridad Moro-Gronlier is the author of Tortillera (TRP 2021), winner of The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series and the chapbook Visionware (FLP 2009). She is a Contributing Editor for Grabbed: Poets and Writers Respond to Sexual Assault (Beacon Press, 2020) and Associate Editor for SWWIM Every Day, an online daily poetry journal.

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

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