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The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The New Life by Wendy Wisner

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This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Merrick Sloane, is from The New Life by Wendy Wisner (Cornerstone Press 2024).

Content Warning: infant death

Milk

We sit on the bed.
She lifts her shirt,
skin ashen and damp,
stomach concave.
She hasn’t eaten in days.
But there’s milk.
She squeezes it out
like I showed her
when her daughter was alive.
Fat, glistening drops.
Am I doing it right? she asks.
If milk is coming out,
you’re doing it right.
It’s what I said
when her daughter was here,
her warm, sleepy cheek
against her mother’s breasts
while we hand-
expressed
milk
into her tiny mouth.
As I’m leaving,
she fingers the red threads
of an Elmo doll
lying on the coffee table
among baby pictures
and glasses of water.
I tell her I remember
that her daughter loved Elmo.
She asks if I would like a sandwich.
She says, We have so much food.

Wendy Wisner (she/her) is the author of three books of poems, most recently The New Life, published by Cornerstone Press (University of Wisconsin Stevens-Point) and named a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year. Wendy’s poems and essays have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Review, Passages North, Verse Daily, The Washington Post, Lilith Magazine, and elsewhere. 

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.


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