The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: As If This Did Not Happen Every Day by Paula Lambert

This selection, chosen by guest editor Alexis Ivy, is from As If This Did Not Happen Every Day by Paula Lambert (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2024).

Indoctrination, 1972

You were their leader, that gang of boys, that tangle of freckles
and wide-striped shirts. You chose a girl and they chased her down,

pinning her arms and legs while you kissed her, quick, on the lips.
The day they caught me, I felt a word I couldn’t name explode

in my chest. I kicked and scratched at all those hands, those fingers
now losing their grip. You kept coming, leaning in while I lurched

away, until finally letting out a disgusted sigh: This one’s too much
trouble. Let her go. It was second grade, St. Anthony’s school, and

the church loomed, straight and serious, over the playground. At its
entrance, two tall fir trees shivered in the breeze, whispering, laughing.

Paula J. Lambert has published ten collections of poetry, and a new book, Terms of Venery, Revised, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Also a visual artist and literary translator, her work has been recognized by PEN America and supported by the Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist. More at www.paulajlambert.com.

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.