The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from How Blood Works by Ellene Glenn Moore, released by Kent State University Press in 2021.

In Lawrenceburg, Tennessee

At noon in Lawrence County the earth opens, 
red clay torn through, and in his casket 
my grandfather is as pale as wake-robin. 
I ask my father where I should sit, lean down to kiss 
my grandmother who does not know who I am. 
And now her hips are bothered, 
her hands are saying she’d rather be anywhere 
but here. We all are looking for escape— 
the door, the hall—but now my father speaks, 
his voice a scythe, and he says my dad, my dad, 
and in this space even the walls are wired. 
The bees, the honey, singing in a field. 
We bare our wrists, we rock open our hands, 
voices raised and falling in our laps 
for we don’t care to stay here long, my lord, 
the cleft in the rock, this clay beneath the floor. 
The clock in the hall rises over the shag, 
the mud, the beaten linoleum. Did you know 
your granddaddy composed songs, did you know 
he fixed that clock together in the woodshop, 
soft sun illuminating grit and motes, 
the concrete floor thrumming beneath his feet, 
the air too sweet to breathe.

Ellene Glenn Moore is an American writer living in Zürich. She is the author of How Blood Works (Kent State University Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Ellene’s poetry, lyric non-fiction, and critical work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, Brevity, West Branch, and elsewhere. Find her at elleneglennmoore.com.