The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Orchid Alpha by Kimberly Southwick

This selection, chosen by guest editor JJ Rowan, is from Orchid Alpha by Kimberly Southwick (Trembling Pillow Press 2023).

Prime Directive During Venus Retrograde

the silverfox fur Nana gave me is unsafe here even within plastic
as the azaleas gasp at the humidity but still wilt to empty latex balloons.
it’s March in the south & they’re naming the geographies of Pluto,
a non-planet with moons & topography & a crowd-sourced identity.
they say mountains then features like the proper noun they’ve chosen matters
more than the physical properties of what they’re naming but cannot touch.

shea butter, palm ash, rusted window screen. one for the honey,
two for the smoke, the cane fields, the fire. I’m running out of ways
to say I’m lonely enough for the two of us. I’m lying here lonely & don’t
touch me. the soupy air or the heat on or the fans non-stop, a fine film
of pollen that time alone helps disappear. I’m lying in bed & I can see my closet
& its too many clothes, hear every ugly sound the windchime makes. I never
had enough breath for the clarinet, for the marching band. water pools
the cracked concrete street. I never had roots deep enough to know home.

Kimberly Ann Southwick is a poet and Assistant Professor in the English Department at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. She is the founder and editor in chief of the print literary-arts journal, Gigantic Sequins. Kimberly earned her PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2020. She is originally from South Jersey.

JJ Rowan is a queer nonbinary poet and dancer whose writing and movement practices have developed largely out of collaborative approaches and the pursuit of deep connection. They are looking for the places where the written line and the lines of the moving body intersect, where genre blurs and remixes and reboots, and where style and role reach maximum fluidity and deeper capacity. Their chapbook, a simple verb, is available from Bloof Books. You can follow their handwriting and movement projects on Instagram.