The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney (YesYes Books 2023).

DYNAMITE

A ghost leaves your body and never returns—
this is a lie.

A person has to earn
the right to forget.

What if, from now on,
I subscribe to that specific turn-of-the-century-belief
that illness is caused by spirits—

use this to explain why
I tried to protect your body with mine: My life for yours,
remember?
No matter where that promise would have taken me
I would’ve made it. I would’ve

slept forever for you to live.
I’m sorry I lived

through what you could not.
Do you remember the earth before this earth,

your birthplace on fire?
Now my body is kindling owned by your ghost. If I become anything
let there be no stopping it

let there be grace in living thigh to thigh with ghosts.

That’s the thing about using ghosts as explanations for illness:
you hold them close enough and they become a part of you,

long enough and you forget they are there, they become an apology,
they rip the roof off of the sky.

Jill Mceldowney (she/her) is the author of the full-length collections Alydar (YesYes Books, forthcoming 2026) and Otherlight (YesYes Books 2023), winner of a North American Book Award. She is found and editor of Madhouse Press. She is a recipient of a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her previously published word can be found in publications such as The Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier, Muzzle, and other notable publications.

Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.