The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Astronauts by Amy Miller

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Astronauts by Amy Miller (Beloit Poetry Journal 2022).

The Story

My sister does this thing with the telephone. Turns it into an extraction device, a many-pronged grabber that snakes through the line and comes out my earpiece. It’s tiny. It only takes a memory, a flash of pain, then whisks it back to her end where she puts it under a microscope. I can tell she has a little piece when she starts asking questions: But didn’t you want to kill him? Did you suspect he was doing that? She’s reading the dyed cells of my brain, and that slice on the slide is now hers, a thing she can catalog and reread and bring out whenever she needs a small lever, a shocking little photo. I collect pieces of her too, pictures of the mountains of boxes in her house, her TV’s watering eye, the city of lost artifacts on her coffee table. I need these things of hers to use—anti, voodoo, autoimmune. Even our blood is in battle. Every time I lose some, she knows it and has to hear. The story is better than the blood.

Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Recipient of a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR regional listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.

Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.