The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Language of the Wound is Love by Megha Sood

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Language of a Wound is Love by Megha Sood (FlowerSong Press 2025).

Topography of a Wound

What is the topography of a wound?

The origin and provenance of its existence
and its presence defined by its gaping mouth
by the broken semantics of love, hunger, and acceptance.

An old haggard face trying to find its identity
in a shattered mirror to salvage the possibility
of finding its crochet voices in haunting
broken cold corridors of life.

What is a vernacular of pain?

When it screams, haunts, and rattles
us in the night
trying to find flesh lodged
between its saw-edged teeth.

A ghostly presence—
This scar, this wound, has deeply etched in our souls
its haunting melody like a protracted fog in winter
bouncing off thickened concrete.
like a bullet ricocheting in the dark,
like a faint voice in the shroud of the night.

An elegy is an acceptance of the truth—
A black body in the middle of a protest
bare naked with arms splayed
pinned like a monarch
ready for the dumb menageries.

Another news making the headline
for its mindless span of a news cycle.
Prey ready to be devoured
trying to find that sliver of empathy
in the white of your eyes.
Pinning knees on the harsh concrete
as it makes deep impressions
into the hollowed past of this country
asking a bowlful of questions
in its bleary eyes.

A question laced with a deep hunger and empathy
a hunger that rises in my throat,
panic throbbing like a taut wire
devoid of its symphony.

Fear courses in my deep black veins
as the thick blue knees are pressed
a little harder than the last time.

Megha Sood (she/her) is an award-winning Asian-American author, poet, editor, and literary activist from New Jersey. She is Literary Partner with “Life in Quarantine” at Stanford University. Her works have been supported by the National League of American Pen Women, VONA, Kundiman, Dodge Foundation, Pen Women, and Martha’s Vineyard Creative Writing Institute. Her four poetry collections include the award-winning My Body Lives Like a Threat (FlowerSong Press, 2022), My Body is not an Apology (Finishing Lines Press, 2021), Language of the Wound is Love (FlowerSong Press, 2025). She was recently inducted as an honored listee for the 125-year-old Marquis Who’s Who. A 2020 National Level Winner for the Poetry Matters Project, and a Four-Time State Level Winner for the NAMI NJ Dara Axelrod Poetry Award, Megha is a member of National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW), The Artists Forum (USA), ArtPride (NJ), and United Nations Association-US Chapter. She has also been chosen as a featured poet for the 2024 Dodge Poetry Festival. Her widely anthologized poems, essays, and other works discuss her experience as a first-generation immigrant and woman of color. Her 900++ works have been widely featured in print, online journals, public exhibits, and anthologies. Her co-edited anthology The Medusa Project and other works have been selected to be sent to the moon in 2025 as part of the historical LunarCodex Project in collaboration with NASA. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and her 14-year-old son. Find her at https://linktr.ee/meghasood.

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.