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).

The Limb

My fear is that you’ll look up one day
and see all that you’ve missed. I fear that

more than you not looking up at all, and
never knowing, and never changing

your ways—you’ll have to do all this all
over again, you know. It’s seeing that

saves us. Here, I want to say and all
the hard work that comes, after. But it isn’t

work, is it, so much as letting go: a bird
who thinks too much will never lift off

the branch. Bird has only to look up, see
the sky and know her place in it. Then,

it’s as if the branch had never existed at all
and also like it had been there all along.

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.