The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: We are Now the Thing in the Woods by Lauren Parker

This selection, chosen by guest editor H.V. Cramond, is from We are Now the Thing in the Woods by Lauren Parker (Bottlecap Press 2023).

Ask About the Women in Your Family

My grandmother couldn’t cook, so
We wrote her out of the stories
Every holiday, every birthday
Every day she spent preparing
We forgot her name.
When we could remember it, it rolled, foreign
On our tongues, and lips
Like boats too small for choppy swells.

The family rings around the table, chair legs grinding
On linoleum, photo albums open
Blooming like the flowers in her garden that we never
notice, they spring up every year, untended
Struggling through the weeds.
We recognize our smiles
Our noses, the shape of our eyes
We flip through photos, but no
One sees the person behind the camera
No one mentions her nose, the shape of her eyes
The one who organized
And labeled the albums, script as tight and drawn
As a mouth in concentration
as you stir a quickly burning sauce.

Her death is the equator, an invisible line
Declaring the loosely navigational space
Where the family stores our myths, the stars that predict who
We are, we use trinkets of navigation
Books of genealogy, stories of war generals
Sailing, settlement, we shout over her voice
She fades into the couch cover, a transparent
Plastic thing protecting the fabric underneath
We never forgive her for dying
We never forgive her for not being able to
Make a meatloaf
Or a pie
Or a casserole.

Lauren Parker is a writer, zinemaker, and visual artist in Oakland, California. She has written for the Toast, Strange Horizons, The Racket, Xtra Magazine, Catapult, and Autostraddle. She is the author of the poetry collection We Are Now the Thing in the Woods with Bottlecap Press, The Dark Way Down with Animal Heart Press (2025), and Spells for Success: 40 Spells to Set Intentions and Manifest Everyday Wins with Simon Element (2025). She also has a newsletter, Do You Want to Do Some Witchcraft?

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.