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).

Never Adopt, Says the Cabdriver.

That’s not your blood.
That’s not your child.
Adopted will kill you in your sleep
with a mop handle
pressed against your neck.
Adopted will tie you up
with the strings of your own guitar.
And like his car
I’m suddenly dangerous.
Strangely intimate.
Something jumped into
without enough thought.
I’m not, to this man,
just short of a secret.
A child attempting to pass
for a real child.
A second-best.
A cuckoo in the nest.
A joke between
sitcom siblings, shorthand
for Something is wrong here.
For You don’t really belong here.

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.