The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: I Was One of My Memories by Laurie Blauner

This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from I Was One of My Memories by Laurie Blauner (Pank Books 2021).

Room without Space and Time, the Future

     A man knocks at the door, a parade of people enter.
     The hands of a clock on a table wildly spin in circles. Then the clock hurls
itself against a wall.
     Walls move themselves away, becoming taller, thinner walls.
     A table is swept up by a river of light and carried out the narrow door.
     One window always looks into dark, endless space punctuated by a few
faraway stars and planets.
     A person sits in a chair, growing younger in the room.
     Neither day nor night appears consistently.
     Silence washes through everything and occasionally there’s a small sound like
water hurrying somewhere.
     Sometimes a ceiling or floor disappears, reappearing later in a different
material or shape.
     The person sits still in the chair, waiting for time, trying to decide how best
it to use it when it arrives.

Laurie Blauner is the author of eight books of poetry, five novels, and a hybrid non-fiction book called I Was One of My Memories that won PANK’s CNF Book Award. Her work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Georgia Review, Superstition Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, and many other magazines.

Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.