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).

Communion

    Andante gracioso

My hands, heavy as prayers
divide the yolks from the whites,
the stirring spoon, a silver sigh.
It is as if I had spent the whole day
crawling through the hours.
on my hands and knees
for I cannot forget my own
son’s freshly broken body
fragile as an eggshell.

Our sorrow
beyond void and hunger
has been too deep to swallow
longed for the taste of avgolemono soup,
to feel inside the deep scour of lemon
pungent, tart, and acrid.

Yet, somehow, tonight,
this task of creating a difficult soup
works its way by accident to perfection.

Our table set for four,
contains an empty bowl,
for we agree he is with us still,
lucent in our spoons.

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.