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).

Tahitian Sky

Dear Cloud,

I’m unfolding and refolding myself to try
to force myself out of grief and back into
love. I am stubborn, remembering
places, events, reliving moments through
cell phone photographs, memory and
reenacting what happened once like
postcards sent from a faraway island.

I remember how Cyrus trembled when
an airplane passed overhead. Sometimes
the plane tried to write something in the
sky that didn’t last.

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.