The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Apostasies by Holli Carrell

This selection, chosen by Guest Editor t.r. san, is an excerpt from Apostasies by Holli Carrell (Perugia Press 2025).

Content Warning: domestic violence or child abuse

EXHIBIT

Waking to a hand around my neck,
I wasn’t surprised. Violence seemed
a certain inevitability. Mundane

as a mother’s command, her hands

twisting and plaiting my hair.
Was I even in my body?
I try to examine that moment

from here, like a picture in a museum:

myself, barely past girl, so estranged
from my body. A little broken
in the mind, too, some plate inside shattered.

(It didn’t even seem like my choice to make.)

How I just laid there, and was lucky
as his hand released, slipped off, nothing
worse—a bird lifting off a window ledge.

Holli Carrell (she/they) was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah and now lives in the Midwest, where she recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing with a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. A 2024-2025 Taft Research Center Dissertation Fellow, her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The North American Review, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Bennington Review, and Salt Hill, among other journals.

t.r. san is a poet and translator currently based on Gadigal land, with recent work found in minor literature[s], The Cincinnati Review, HAD, Smokelong Quarterly, The Offing, &c. read & reach @thoushallkill on Twitter, or trsan.neocities.org.