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).

Rocket Science

When Chickie and I climbed into the tree
to sit and wait for our periods,
Chickie was an optimist. I wasn’t sure
mine would ever come. But it did
months after Chickie showed off
her belt, the hooks on each end. Swinging
her legs over the branch, she explained
how grown up felt more clearly than
our teacher did in her lecture,
“On Being a Woman,” better
than the grainy black and white film
with its scientific diagrams—
the retort-shaped organ floating
in our girl bodies, the miniature
rockets our brothers were
always trying to get us to touch.

Chickie and I educated ourselves,
studied the pamphlets, got answers
from the books we read.
We believed in science then, in Apollo
and a manned moon. We believed
we had learned all we needed
to know about how it would go
with the boys. We imagined it
was an experiment in simple biology.

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.