The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: PSYCH MURDERS by Stephanie Heit

Wardrobe Best Dressed
Image Description: The title, Psych Murders, appears vertically in large charcoal caps running up and down the page. In the center is a charcoal bipolar neuron with synapses. The nucleus is a black circle with an open mouth and chasm throat in red, perhaps screaming, with pointed white teeth like a shark. On top is the silhouette of a man with a fedora wielding a scythe at the neuron. Stephanie Heit is written in red ballpoint cursive on the lower left.
Cover design: Lindsey Cleworth
Cover art: “What I have learned (Bipolar Neuron)” by Chanika Svetvilas

This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from PSYCH MURDERS by Stephanie Heit (Wayne State University Press 2022).

The navigational chip in my head got knocked. I need instructions for which way to turn at the end of the driveway. Can’t locate the bathroom in the yoga studio. Forget where my best friend lives. Even after a year, I need the vigilance of Google Map Woman to make it to the location of my weekly Spanish group. I don’t hold the city grid in my body—topographical disorientation. The place cells in my hippocampus lost. Wayfinder skills nonexistent. I live in a micro- directional landscape with room for where I am and not for where I am going. I don’t like driving with people since I need full concentration to get from A to B and get embarrassed when I don’t know how to get to B, C, D. When I say I don’t know where Gallup Park is and the person gives cross streets and the school nearby, or even worse, the compass-oriented clan tell me it’s on the southeast side of town on the north side of the street, I learn to nod and say yes, yes I do know where that is since those navigational types take I don’t know as a challenge and don’t give up until I am the star on the map
                                                                  you are here.

Headshot of Stephanie Heit, a white queer disabled cis woman smiling, wearing a purple wrap, with brown wavy hair in a bob. She is on (perhaps in, feet dangling) the Huron River with background muted green of tree leaves, and dappled light before dusk.
Image credit: Tamara Wade

Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe territory in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her creative disciplines are fluid and inform each other in inquiries that delve into somatic experiences of how the body inhabits the page, words inhabit the body, and how the environment we place our bodyminds in stimulate new awareness. She is bipolar, a shock/psych system survivor, a mad activist, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her poetry collections are the book of hybrid memoir poems PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and The Color She Gave Gravity (Operating System, 2017).

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief of beestung, Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

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