The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Self-Talk by Esinam Bediako

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Romy Ewing, is from Self-Talk by Esinam Bediako (Porkbelly Press 2025).

Content Warning: racism or racialized violence

Offering

For mercy, I lay at your feet all I own:
rocks and stones and bricks I collected
as a child who liked the idea of collections;
my summer of permed hair when my mother
finally let me let the gheri curl go; the fall
when all that heat-stressed hair broke away
in clumps in my comb; my blood and
the shame that came with it, the buds
and their bloom and the cramped style
of becoming; a woman—my seventh-grade
best friend’s mother, no less—laughing
at my body in a bathing suit, at the way
my hair shrunk in the pool; my father’s hand
with the hole in its heart that I missed
when he forgot to wave goodbye;
the heart-shaped notebook my sister gave me;
all the notebooks everybody gave me;
all the words that didn’t come;
all the words that did.

Esinam Bediako (she/her) is a Ghanaian American writer from Detroit. She is the author of the Ann Petry Award-winning novel, Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024), as well as the essay/poetry chapbook, Self-Talk (Porkbelly Press, 2025). You can find some of her recent work in Porter House Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Great River Review, North American Review, and Southern Humanities Review. Esi lives in Claremont, CA with her family.

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