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).

Sonnet Wherein I Predict the Future

the trees are talking to one another
again. they’re laughing that Pinker once
convinced humans grammar was innate,
as if to only us. the daisies sleep
in the sun. the island doesn’t know
it’s the last island. the tide grows impatient.
the trees remember seasons, though the seas can’t,
young & old at once & restless with waves.

the sun screams on & on, the hot breeze its
currency. below the water’s surface,
cities still are drowning, like they’ll never
get to drowned, like if they just keep drowning
in the present progressive, they’ll live forever.

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.