The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: tether & lung by Kimberly Ann Priest

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ty Raso, is from tether & lung by Kimberly Ann Priest (Texas A&M University Press 2025).

The Chickens

In the yard, the chickens peck mindlessly at broken shells
thrown out the back door
forgetting that these once held their own
unfertilized seed.

I watch them nibble at the calcite
and think about my womb—how hollow it feels—as a hen
rejects her tiniest offspring.

If God is Mother gathering her chicks beneath her wings,
why does the hen deny this little one refuge?

Everything in creation is soft and violent:

this morning, after sunrise, harvested eggs dashed to pieces
against my kitchen countertop
because my children are hungry.

With pangs I remember that I too must eat.

Kimberly Ann Priest (she/her) is the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells, as well as the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). A professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, she lives with her husband in Maine.

Ty Raso (she/they) is a trans character, poet, and teacher. Her work has shared space with POETRY, Electric Literature, The Adroit Journal, Foglifter Journal, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She feels most at home near rivers, and they were a 2023-2024 and 2025-2026 Poetry Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and a 2025 Djanikian Scholar with The Adroit Journal. Her debut full-length collection, MIRROR WOULD BE A BEAUTIFUL NAME FOR A CHILD is forthcoming with Noemi Press in October 2027. You can find her on Instagram @spaghetti_utopia.