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The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dark Beds by Diana Whitney


This selection, chosen by guest editor Alexis Ivy, is from Dark Beds by Diana Whitney (June Road Press, 2023).

Everything But

Don’t make me be fifteen again but god
give me one more pent-up afternoon
down in the den laid out on the couch
like birthday cake my senior boyfriend spooned

piece by sugared piece into his mouth.
Grant me uncharted hours of roaming hands,
delicious shimmy out of jeans and blouse
before all territory was staked and planned,

before latex, the expectation of release.
Fooling around we called it and we were fools
feasting on bare skin in mazy sheets,
artlessly skirting our parents’ rules

till the needle skittered across the black
vinyl and god the nameless world was mapped.


Diana Whitney writes across genres with a focus on feminism, motherhood, and sexuality. Dark Beds, her second poetry collection, was published by June Road Press in 2023 and named a finalist for the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award. She is also the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves (2021), winner of the Claudia Lewis Award. Her work has appeared in The New York TimesThe Kenyon ReviewGlamourElectric Literature, and elsewhere. Her first book, Wanting It, won the Rubery Book Award, and her third collection, Girl Trouble, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in 2026. Diana has received numerous grants for her writing, including from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Vermont Arts Council, and holds an MFA in poetry from New England College. A feminist activist in her Vermont hometown and beyond, she advocates for survivors of sexual violence and works as a writing coach and as a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit.

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.

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