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).

When least expected,

magic twines legs like

a cat. Or was it always

here, and by averting

eyes from the shadow,

I missed its shine? Or

did A strike it from my

flint-like limbs? Either

way,²¹ its song fills every

room, and I only have

to notice what catches

in my throat when

I lift voice in return.

____________
21“It is not that something different is seen, but that one
sees differently. It is as though the spatial act of seeing were
changed by a new dimension,” Carl Jung.

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.