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).

content warning for pedophilia

Dog Days

Along this county FM road there’s water vapor
gathered in the ditches and overhead
the oaks show dusty green. The radio reports
on politics and fornication, a teacher
and her thirteen-year-old lover. Good folks
are stunned by gossip and hot weather.

Lord, save us from the need to chide sad flesh
or to believe we’re not all animals with wishes.
Help us admit the blessing in an August wind,
a cloud-troweled sky, the shelf of blue behind.

Show us the truth’s an urgent belly,
what we need most, the slick fender on a Chevy,
a body bent over it, hot as a summer garage,
the roller coaster second before we come.

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.