The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: These Hollowed Bones by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from These Hollowed Bones by Amelia Díaz Ettinger (Sea Crow Press 2024).

A Gannet Named Nigel

        Morus serrator

                                     —The Washington Post by Karin Brulliard, February 6, 2018

should i be sad for Nigel
maybe bellow his loss?

he loved a cement
Gannet for all of his life

she was a decoy
a lure to bring more of his kind

and yet, for years he was faithful
he gave her fish and renovated their nest

she was everything for him season after season
his silent companion on an empty rocky shore

while her paint faded and no other gannets met
he waited by her side

for the sound of her and others
was his song different then in this void?

did he sing his throaty vibrato?
or did he wait to be far at sea to screech?

i don’t know these things
but i know something about his seclusion

too afraid to venture far
now i live with decoys—images that talk inside of boxes

where i share a few fragments
in the safety of these flat screens

like Nigel—

i feed my solitude the best i can
try to find faith in a setting sun

while i cling to this hope—
a world full of Gannets and their full song

Amelia Díaz Ettinger’s (she/her) poetry and short stories have been published in anthologies, literary magazines, and periodicals. She is the author of two chapbooks and four books of poetry. She has an MS in Biology and MFA in creative writing. Her literary work is a marriage of science and her experience as an immigrant.

Jacob Jardel (he/they) is a CHamoru writer, scholar, and educator born in Guåhan (Guam), raised in California and Oklahoma, and currently based in Kansas City. He’s currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Humanities with a focus in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A former Editor for The Sosland Journal and The Central Dissent, his work has appeared in The 580 Mixtapes Vol. 1, Fanachu’s Voices of the Diaspora zine, and No. 1 Magazine. He is also a member of the Garden Party Collective, through which he published his poetry chapbook Full-Blooded CHamaole in 2024. Online, Jacob lives at his website itsjacobj.com, on Instagram and Threads @itsjacobj, and sometimes on BlueSky @itsjacobj.bsky.social. Offline, he lives with his partner, his cat, and his ever-growing board game and Magic the Gathering collection.