The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Maybe the Body by Asa Drake


This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Claudia Santos, is from Maybe the Body by Asa Drake (Tin House 2026).


Tonight, a Woman

Asked not to put language in the garden

                                                                                       I could not.

Tonight, a CNN reporter was arrested when an officer refused to hear her
credentials. He repeatedly asked, Do you speak

                                                                                English. Now I fear I may be told I

speak nothing.

              Ignore everything I have said about care.


                                                                              I say it twice to negate.
   

I have heard someone I love speak around someone I love, like English is a sieve
for catching one another’s cruelty.

                              Catch and hold.

If people keep saying they love me





                                                                                                    maybe they love me

                                           and don’t know what else to say.

The earth is an emotional wreck.

                                                                           The earth is Eden + sin.

We are alive in an era of firsts we don’t recognize. A co-worker takes an ugly
photo of me in my favorite dress, and I have no redemption arc.


                                                Only a lovely speech pattern.
 

I had tried to say something about the garden. I had tried to say something
about myself.

                                         Plants that grow like weeds are popular cultivars.

We know the aftermath.


Asa Drake (she/her) is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. She is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press, 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Kenyon Review Residential Writers Workshop, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems are published or forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Poetry, and Sewanee Review. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist.

Claudia Santos (she/her) is a Mexican reader and writer. She received the PECDA Colima 2024 writing grant for her non-fiction work and was a Sophia-FILCO Young Writers 2025 finalist for her poetry work. She is currently pursuing an MA in Children’s Literature as a EMJM scholarship recipient.


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