The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is from Love from the Outer Bands by Mary Block (The Word Works 2025).

Diluvian Blessing

May the road rise up to meet you
when the tide defeats the town.
May you find a way
to get your kids to Georgia.
May the wind die down.
May the sun show you mercy,
the former inhabitant
of an elaborate circuit
of thermally optimized dwellings
and automobiles.
May the rain fall soft
on your broken city,
pitch black, dazzling
in its downed power lines,
volatile snakeheads
sparking and snapping,
hissing at legions
of disinterred dinosaurs,
liquefied, blooming
from the exhaust pipe
of a surrendering god
on his way to the state line,
hands at ten and two.

Mary Block (she/her) is the author of Love from the Outer Bands (Word Works Books, 2025). Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Nimrod International Journal, and Sonora Review, among other publications, and can be found online at Rattle, SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer—The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing Program, a 2018 Best of the Net finalist, a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Mary lives in her hometown of Miami, Florida with her spouse, her young children, and her old dachshund. She is an editor at SWWIM.

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.