The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Talk Smack to a Hurricane by Lynne Jensen Lampe

Wardrobe Best Dressed

This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Talk Smack to a Hurricane by Lynne Jensen Lampe (IceFloe Press 2022).

Chiaroscuro

The moon drums its fingers
across Carnelian Lake, shrugs,
waits for the loon cry.
Seckel pears fester on the ground,
soft & meaningless. Blisters
weep for winter, feed
what could become spring.

Could. Conditional tense,
what we wish for. Hope for.
The gaze is everything.
Silence scabs thought
& all dead belong to the King.
God. Religion’s needle,
dull blue bruise. Hurt
means feeling & feeling
means alive. We knuckle
our fear. We hope

our feet to the floor
every morning. A new
song drops & we dance
in the kitchen, throw open
our curtains to the sky.

Lynne Jensen Lampe’s debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), a 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award winner and finalist for the 8th Annual McMath Book Award, concerns motherhood, mental illness, and antisemitism. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Lips Poetry Journal, Stone Circle Review, Rise Up Review, THRUSH, Yemassee, and elsewhere. She edits academic writing, reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and lives with her husband and two dogs in Columbia, MO, where she’s a core member of Dame Good Writers.


Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.

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