The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Dubious Breath by Jennifer Davis Michael

This selection, chosen by guest editor H.V. Cramond, is from Dubious Breath by Jennifer Davis Michael (Finishing Line Press 2022).

Fog Made of Stone

“What if the fog were made of stone?”
my son asked from the back seat
the week before the world shut down.
Practiced, I bounced the question back
like a tennis ball against a wall.
He answered, “We couldn’t get through.”
As tires gripped its slippery blur,
the road unwound into the mist.

“What if the stone were made of fog?”
—the question never asked that day
but implicit ever since,
everything that seemed solid
now porous as a sponge,
and bodies made of emptiness:
black boxes on a flat screen,
a needle’s breadth between them.

And still, it’s “Can you hear me?”
“Am I getting through?”
I think of Anticleia’s shade
dissolving from Odysseus’s embrace.
We hug the air instead of flesh
to keep the flesh unharmed.
If only this catabasis
brought prophecy to light.

Jennifer Davis Michael grew up in Alabama, lived briefly in Oxford and Chicago, and has spent most of her adult life in Sewanee, Tennessee, where she is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of the South. Her academic specialty is British Romanticism, especially William Blake. Besides her scholarly monograph, Blake and the City (Bucknell, 2006), she has published two poetry chapbooks, both from Finishing Line Press: Let Me Let Go (2020) and Dubious Breath (2022). She is currently working on a full-length collection, Bodies at Rest.

H.V. Cramond holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was the founding Poetry Editor of Requited Journal for 10 years. In 2018, she helped pass the Survivor’s Bill of Rights in Illinois as an organizer for Rise. Read more of her writing on her website.