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).

Proposal

DORIAN
May my love for you meditate across my tongue
like a perpetual prayer. I want every part of you,
perfect and loud. If you open, I will enter,

a willing participant in this sorcery, this explosion,
this body built of blue and bone. May the map
we draw together lead our children home, a compass
tattooed in our smiles, our joy. I cannot scrub you
from my pores, now stained with your magic.
Take me from this Earth
if ever I should try.

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.