The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios (Kelsay Books 2023).

Out of Tune

    Mesto

The E flat key on the piano is             dead
the hammer         frozen
in place unable to strike the string

I press on the ivory                 over
and          over           but no
song    only a fistful of                silence

I want to play Our Love is Here to Stay
a melody I can lean into for consolation
but with each dead E flat the       tune             thuds

with a hiccupped           gap            in the             song
as if typing love          lyrics   on a typewriter
without          an            L

never able to say the word           Love

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios’ (she/her) award-winning chapbook, Special Delivery, was published in 2016, her second, Empty the Ocean with a Thimble in 2021, and her third, Concerto for an Empty Frame by Kelsay Books in 2023. Nominated four times for a pushcart prize, twice for Best of Net, she has poems published in numerous anthologies and journals. A Professor Emerita from American University, she has performed as a singing artist across Europe and the United States, is editor of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast Anthology, artistic director of the Redwoods Opera and a member of international Who’s Who of Musicians. Her website is Kirkpatrick-Vreniospoet.com.

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.