The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: FLOWN by B. Fulton Jennes

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Romy Ewing, is from FLOWN by B. Fulton Jennes (Porkbelly Press 2024).

My Dying Sister’s Words Are Gone

It’s no use to call now. I buy
signal lamps instead.

I touch my lamp
and hers glows pink.

She touches back,
my lamp glows blue.

All those years we didn’t talk.
Now we signal.

Pink. Blue. Pink.

In Sunday school we sang
This little light of mine

I’m gonna let it shine.
Hide it under a bushel?

Hers was always
the loudest no!

Now even the song
is gone.

The poems of B. Fulton Jennes have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including Comstock Review, MER, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, and Tupelo Quarterly. She is the winner of the 2025 Subnivean Award, the 2023 Millennium Award, the 2022 Lascaux Prize, as well as many other poetry competitions. Her collection Blinded Birds received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. FLOWN—an elegy-in-verse to her late sister—was published by Porkbelly Press in 2024. A third chapbook, Dirty Bird & Myrt, will be published by Dancing Girl Press in 2026. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the Poetry in the Garden festival each summer and hosts “Poems from Connecticut’s Four Corners,” a monthly online reading series.

Romy Rhoads Ewing (she/her) writes from Sacramento, CA, where she was born and raised. Her work has appeared in HAD, Oyez Review, Rejection Letters, Bullshit Lit, Major 7th Magazine, and more. Her poetry chapbook please stay was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press. Her hybrid zine, someday [everybody but] us will laugh about all of this, was briefly physically distributed at the 3rd Annual Hallow-Zine Fest and is available digitally. She also edits poetry and nonfiction for JAKE and runs the archival site SACRAMENTO DIRTBAG ARCHIVES. She can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz