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The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: A Woman in Progress by Barbara Marie Minney

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This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Claudia Santos, is from A Woman in Progress by Barbara Marie Minney (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2024).


41

—to commemorate our 41st anniversary

and I don’t mean George H.W. Bush. I mean us. Two
fragmented Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts. Stimulated and
inspired by diverse elements. Cross-pollinated into one queer
variety.

I want to bleed poetry for you
shout alleluia until my lungs explode
sweat psalms of thanksgiving and praise.

Youth like an out of focus photograph. Glazed over by time.
Raising our heads toward heaven in veneration. Sentient
shadows seeking the mind asylum. Souls colliding on
moonbeams.

Beauty out of chaos
creating our own divine presence
pieces of our selves forever in the other’s heart.

Motionless in the Amish bed and breakfast. Kissing deeply and
honestly. Eleven on the McDonald’s pickle scale. Claiming our
transformative love. A revolutionary act.

You said you loved me very much. Space stilled. Time stopped.
Lightning in a snowstorm. Radiant light miracle.

For the first time
after all these years
I finally believed it.

Barbara Marie Minney (she/her), a seventh generation Appalachian, is a transgender woman, award winning poet and writer, speaker, teaching artist, guest reader/editor, and quiet activist. Her poetry and essays have been extensively published and translated into Spanish. She is the author of four poetry collections: If There’s No Heaven, the winner of the 2020 Poetry Is Life Book Award and an Akron Beacon Journal Best Northeast Ohio Book in 2020; the Poetic Memoir Chapbook Challenge (2021); Dance Naked With God (2023); and A Woman in Progress, the winner of the 2024 American Fiction Award for Poetry Chapbook, an Eric Hoffer Da Vinci Eye Award Finalist, and a San Francisco Book Festival Runner-Up.  Barbara is a retired attorney and lives in Tallmadge, Ohio, with her wife of over 44 years and a menagerie of stuffed animals.

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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