The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Panacea by Alison Strub

---

Address to Andreas Vesalius

I am brittle like the brittle star.
I planted
gladiolas in the rich earth,
and ate a diet of milk.

I describe myself as
I would a mushroom:
orange-red, polished, fragile, milk white,
black where bruised.

Maybe my face was milk white when you told me.
Maybe my face was milk white when I realized.
Maybe I burned the words you wrote on the page.

The white bread and the milk consumed,
pure soft water poured over the soil.
I hold the mushroom upside down, gills pink,
breathe the scent of pears.