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

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

The Silence Finds its Way to Me

The silence finds its way to me
     as the wrinkled man
          beaten and withdrawn
sits on the worn park bench
     fountains smiling in his head.
Pulling a scarf of quietude around me
     I dream beyond the
           boundaries of my imagination
and like Chinese demons
     travel on a straight line
toward smiles of delicious pleasure
    as silky desire
         heats my soul.

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.