The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Running Wild by Patricia McMillen

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Editor’s Note

I owe Esinam Bediako, Patricia ‘Ti’ McMillen, guest editor Maggie Rue Hess, and Sundress’s subscribers an apology. When I scheduled the posts of Ms. McMillen’s poems, I failed to update the author photo. Ms. Bediako does not deserve to be incorrectly associated with another author’s work and Ms. McMillen deserves to be showcased accurately alongside her poems and receive the same recognition as our other featured authors. You deserve to see them respectively as such! The original and future posts have been corrected. I am deeply sorry for my error and hope that you are able to continue enjoying Ms. McMillen’s work.

Merrick Sloane, Managing Editor of The Wardrobe

Little Sister

When I think how close I came
to losing you in the Monadnock Building
after my first eye doctor appointment,
Mom and I both stunned to hear him say
I needed glasses—would I never
dance Swan Lake?—both crying, waiting
for the elevator which though classy

had no operator, was uncomprehending
as a toaster or neuro-ophthalmologist,
and when it came, how you hopped right on
while we stood, watched those ornate
glass-and-brass doors bang shut, eight-year-old
you on one side with your pixie haircut,
Mom and thirteen-year-old me on the other:

O then did I become a woman, then know
what loss would be, and when, that same lifetime,
Mom and I still paralyzed on the seventh floor,
the same doors clanged open again, revealing you
untouched, unharmed, valiant in the elevator cab,

O then did we three keen in tragic unison
all the way out to Jackson Boulevard.

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