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).

I dream a campfire ringed

with logs behind a now

derelict playground, and

at my feet, patent leather

shoes, curl of satin, child’s

dress.¹⁵ I lower each, watch

flames lick, obscure. Then

I see a woman, a stranger,

at the edge of the clearing.

But she’s gone when I look

again, so I claw ash to find

it all unburned—gleaming

leather, ribbon in a bow,

____________
15 “Dissociation is the essence of trauma. The overwhelming
experience is split off and fragmented, so that the emotions, sounds,
images, thoughts, and physical sensations related to the trauma take on
a life of their own.”

dress folded just as mom

set it out that day. Hands

wet now with tar, I wipe,

but it won’t budge.¹⁶ Then,

all at once, the forest starts

singing—cicada, owl, wind—

as I drag palms down my

nightgown, spreading dark.

____________
16 “We are dealing with a dual reality, the reality of the
relatively secure and predictable present that lives side by side
with a ruinous, ever-present past.”

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.