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).

Exhibit S: Pa’ que me quieras por siempre

Leaves on fire, something to hold the loss. The only jar deep enough is the flower at the base of the skull. A flame blossoming in my hand and a knife in the opposite palm. The darkness kneeling with its hands full of wheat. Knee deep in the threshing, oh stand back. Wheat is feathers, wheat is the delicate plates of the skull fusing, refusing. Belkis, cross my back with plate darmor, my knuckles with scales. Let my palms be the ones puckering with fish.

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.