The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: FishWife by Alysse McCanna

This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from FishWife by Alysse McCanna (Black Lawrence Press, 2024).

WOMAN TURNED INSIDE OUT

This is what a healthy pink vagina looks like
the doctor says to the intern

The room is white, glinting metal caught
in fluorescence, half-closed shades
betraying a litter-strewn park

Girl will hold this compliment
inside for a long time

even as woman, when her hands are raw-
pink from dishy soapwater, her body strange,
turned inside out like a housewife’s yellow gloves

like a blossom or a wallet or a womb,
a nicer word than uterus—too raw, too empty,

such a nicer word than matrix or mold,
pear or purse. Why pink?
Why is pink compliment?

A man she loved, of goodish devillooks,
said he loved her pink and also her mind

but what he really meant was I am lucky
you are so blind to the bruise that is my love
sting-pink and singing, high note of honor

Woman stands in line at the gas station,
smells the aftermath of a cologne

so familiar yet untraceable that she flees, throws up
in the parking lot, asphalt home to half-cigarettes,
Styrofoam, now the body’s memory:

pink on the blacktop, bird flown from cage, the body’s
language, a shout that becomes

a kind of singing.

Alysse Kathleen McCanna is the author of FishWife (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Her poetry has appeared in North American Review, The Rumpus, Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, and other journals. Alysse’s chapbook Pentimento won the 2017 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition. Her work has been supported by the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Tucson Festival of Books, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She holds a PhD in English from Oklahoma State University, an MFA from Bennington College, and serves as Associate Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine. Alysse is an Associate Professor of English at Colorado Mountain College in the Vail Valley.

Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry, and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium, Poets House, and Sundress Publications. When they are not writing or editing, Merrick loves to serve as a pillow for their cat, Kitten, while getting lost in new worlds written by other dreamers. Merrick is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.