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).

Radio Silence

That place had the biggest yard. I lost myself in it, warrens and wire cages, beans looping quiet up their poles. The cat slept in a forest of corn. I told myself my raging sister and I had landed on different planets, that’s all, our signals blocked by moons and storms and boyfriend satellites. One of us might come home a hundred years older. I liked being the only human there. My sister deep in some ocean while I pulled carrots up from a thin surviving crust. I hadn’t imagined this world. Science thought of everything here—music wafting from a silver disc, a vertical curved screen that wrote any book I thought of. You would love this, I wanted to tell her. But her world was somewhere else. My radio wasn’t broken. It sat in perfect working order. I stayed outside and dug so deep in that garden that I found another civilization. At night I talked to the lamp and heated soup on the only burner that worked. I made terrible beginner’s bread and froze half of it for the journey I knew was coming.

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.