The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Roadmap: A Choreopoem by Monica Prince

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Jacob Jardel, is an excerpt from Roadmap: A Choreopoem by Monica Prince (Santa Fe Writer’s Project 2023).

Roadmap: A Family Name

DORIAN
The blueprint for the house where love lives
is stamped on my DNA. My skeleton is the rebar
in the walls, my blood the mortar between bricks.
I learned love from the bodies who fashioned me,
whose choices funneled through generations.
They are my roadmap. A family tree
strewn across street signs and construction zones,
etched on the insides of my hands. I follow
the tire tracks back to the first acceleration.
Whose bones broke to make mine?
Watch.

Monica Prince (she/her) serves as an Associate Professor of Activist and Performance Writing at Susquehanna University and the author of three choreopoems, Roadmap, How to Exterminate the Black Woman, and the recently released FORCE. She writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation, and she shares her life with her polycule and three disrespectful cats.

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.