The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: These Aren't My Woods Anymore by Soon Jones

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Merrick Sloane, is from These Aren’t My Woods Anymore by Soon Jones (Poetose Press 2025).

Final Rites

my faith evaporated with the steam rising out
from the lake at dawn when I touched the shell
of my mother and there was nothing left of her.
That morning, I learned prayers don’t go past
the ceiling: they fall back into the maggots

suffocating in the coffin beside my mother.
wood, flesh, fly husks, her cotton floral
dress churns back into the earth, and
bubbles up as grass, wildflowers,
nitrogen in the soil singing rebirth

until the sun engorges herself and
swallows our little blue home,
until we join the chorus of stars
becoming and unbecoming,
our traumas compressed

so deep down anyone
could mistake us
for black holes
who were
never
here
at all.

Soon Jones (they/them) is a Korean-American lesbian poet and writer raised in the rural countryside of the American South. They are a Lambda Literary Fellow with an MFA from Oklahoma State University. Their work has appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Denver Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Moon City Review, and others, and their debut collection, These Aren’t My Woods Anymore, is out now from Poetose Press. When not writing poems or working on cars, you can find Soon going on long walks through nature or stargazing.

Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma. A Best of the Net and AWP Intro Journal Awards Winner, Merrick holds an MFA from UT, Knoxville. Merrick’s work has received support from The DreamYard Project’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Poet’s House. A 2025 Garden Party Collective Neurodivergence / Intersectionality contest winner, Merrick’s poetry also appears in citizen trans* {project}, ANMLY, Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Fruitslice, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. They are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved and is deeply committed to helping create a world that liberates us all.