The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Mom in Space by Lisa Ampleman

This selection, chosen by guest editor JJ Rowan, is from Mom in Space by Lisa Ampleman (LSU Press 2024).

Reasons for Lack of Success

                The BPA saturating
grocery-store receipts
                or sprayed into cans
before the chickpeas and beans.
                Genetic defect,
a stripe of helix miscoupling,
                glitch written as my
genesis coded itself.
                Pestilence or
pesticides as I lolled
                in the womb. Too
much time in hot
                tubs or not enough,
chronic stress,
                the grime that gathers
around the bathroom fixtures
                no matter what cleanser
I try. Adhesions
                from my appendix:
peritoneal snarls.
                A closed soul,
not wanting a child
                with the fervor it deserves.
Wanting it excessively,
                posing together like a nativity
set without its centerpiece,
                out of season,
sentimental. Like that
                insect that entered
through the exhaust fan
                chirring at the window:
bamboozled by biological urge.

Lisa Ampleman is the author of the poetry collections Full Cry and Romances. She is the managing editor of the Cincinnati Review and the poetry series editor at Acre Books.

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.