The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Belle Point Press 2023).

Naked

The fall your father died all the leaves came down
in a three-day rainstorm. It was a damned fine storm.
The rain went on steady, one day into the next, while
leaves fell slow and constant, regular as raindrops.
The last hay baled weeks before, farmers at the co-op
had nothing to do but nod and rock and spit, and watch
the trees strip, till they were naked in the carpeted fields.

You were thirty-four the year those wet hills unrolled, glossy
as a calendar picture, and you took your father’s cancer
like you did the weather. Under the dripping eaves, your chair
tipped back, you talked about the hay, but you seemed slighter,
more like a boy, as if your father’s passing gave you back
childhood, stripped you, washed you down. As if he
fathered you, dying, and you could be naked then, being his son.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for her fourth book, The Mercy of Traffic.

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.