The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: The Eating Knife by Ayelet Amittay

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shira Haus, is from The Eating Knife by Ayelet Amittay (Fernwood Press, 2025).

Self-Portrait as Isaac

                                                         I was a youth—yearling,
                                                         black bristling my lip.

                                                         When you took the knife, I became
                                                         still. Thought and wonder
                                                         peeled away like burnt bark,

                                                         raw underneath. A pair of eyes
                                                         just seeing, and breath, and a pulse—

                                                         Inside my death the possible
                                                         permanence of you
                                                         like time moving backward

                                                         into the time when I was
                                                         half a genetic halo,
                                                         half a heap of petals

                                                         sleeping inside your body
                                                         at the edge of God.

Ayelet Amittay is a poet and psychiatric nurse practitioner in Oregon. Her first book, The Eating Knife, was published in April 2025. Her chapbook, Therapy Room, won second place in the 2024 International 3-Day Chapbook Competition and was published by Harvard Square Press. Ayelet’s poems appear in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Rattle, and others. She was a Yetzirah scholar in 2025. She runs a private psychiatric practice, Wild Geese Mental Health, and serves as an instructor for the Touchstone Institute.

Shira Leah Haus (she/her) is a queer, antizionist Jewish writer from Michigan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, and wildness, among others. She has received support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and placed third in the 2024 Pinch Literary Awards for poetry.