The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer

This selection, chosen by guest editor Alexis Ivy, is from Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer (June Road Press 2024).

After She Dies, My Mom Keeps Getting Mail

Her last issue
of Eating Well
unless she acts immediately

Inside, a three-pea sauté
with mint and Aleppo pepper

I read the instructions five times

Commit them to memory

—

The Red Cross needs my mom
to save babies with malaria

and girls taken
into slavery

and people starving in a city
gnarled by earthquake

Is it any surprise
the ground heaves at its seams

I sign a check with loops so loose
my name could be anyone’s

—

This won’t last forever
the sale flyer insists

Lavoie Family Furniture
is going out of business

These kind-faced Lavoies,
I want to believe them
but tell me how
they can be so sure—

four generations gathered
around a must-move table

Abbie Kiefer is the author of Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024), named a 2025 Julia Ward Howe Award Notable Book, and the chapbook Brief Histories (Whittle Micro-Press, 2024). Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Atlantic, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Image, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other places. She is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal and lives in New Hampshire.

Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. She is co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). A recent resident of the Sundress Academy for the Arts, she lives in her hometown Boston, working as an advocate for the homeless, and teaching in the PoemWorks community.