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).

Cosmopolitan Skylines

There’s something about a shot of Jose Cuervo
that says you’re a city girl now, sophisticated,
lime smile with salt on your tongue. Not

a redneck with a farmer’s tan from,
wouldn’t you know it, farming, long jeans
covering the fire ant bites on your calves.

Your clothes are clean and starched,
fitted to your body,
no illustrated marlin

leaping from the Atlantic
imprinted on threadbare fabric
hanging from your shoulders.

You ran a toothpick under your short nails,
dug out lines of dirt, plucked splinters
and eyebrows alike.

Scrubbed the earth from your knuckles,
the leaves from your hair, the smell of moss
flushed from your skin.

A cigarette in your left hand,
a martini in your right—
even though you hate olives

—so metropolitan. As long
as you don’t let slip out a y’all,
how would anyone know

you’re daydreaming about log cabins
so deep in the woods
the light pollution can’t reach?

All those adolescent years wishing
you’d make it out of the country,
and now all you want

is to return.
This time on your own terms.
This time you won’t be chased

down your street by your neighbors
for being the wrong race, the wrong sexuality,
the wrong kind of not-girl, pick one—

—these lies you tell yourself, painting
over years of terror and a revolver
tucked in your waistband for protection

with a fresh coat of foundation,
concealer, staining your lips
shiny and pink. A city girl

has no need for pocketknives
and snake bite kits. You can be
out here, and no one cares. But god,

if only you could get back to those trees,
clear, cold rivers with muddy banks,
night birds piercing through your walls.

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.