The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Familiar by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Familiar by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (Madhouse Press 2024).

Not again, I think as I wake into

dream—braid dangling like a rat

snake over my face—scream⁹ and

scoot to the back of the bunk. My

poor roommate (spared until now)

screams too as the hag mutters what

sounds like apologies—hard to tell

over all the screaming—then, with

a gesture of long fingers, disappears.

____________
9 “Under extreme conditions people may scream obscenities,
call for their mothers, howl in terror, or simply shut down.”

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (she/her) is the author of Mud In Our Mouths (forthcoming from Northwestern University Press) and Look Alive (winner of the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press), along with numerous chapbooks, most recently Familiar (Madhouse Press, 2024) and The Undead (winner of Sixth Finch Books’ 2020 Chapbook Contest). Her poetry can be found in Fugue, Five Points, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She serves as a Poetry Editor for the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQIA2S+ literary journal and press Foglifter. Her critical work has appeared in Cleaver, Pleiades, The Adroit Journal, and other venues.

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.