The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Birth of Undoing by Emily Patterson

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Ty Raso, is from The Birth of Undoing by Emily Patterson (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2025).

Ultrasound

I was seven when the sea turned
on me, tossed me sideways, stole

          my footing, sloshed me to shore
          like a weed. I stood in saltwater,

sandy hair stuck to my shoulders,
stunned. When I saw the pearly spine

          in the ocean of my body, heard
          the static flutter, it was like that:

a grief unleashed. I said her name,
and the waves overtook me.

          What could I do but surrender
          to their swell? I shed years

of longing like an old skin,
stood reborn, then waded in.

Emily Patterson (she/her) is an award-winning poet and the author of The Birth of Undoing (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025), as well as three chapbooks. Her work appears in North American Review, June Road Press, SWWIM, The Penn Review, and elsewhere. In 2025, her children’s poem “Small is the Seed” was set to choral music by Katerina Gimon and premiered at Carnegie Hall (Oxford University Press). Emily lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio and works as an editor at Highlights for Children. Read more at emilypattersonpoet.com.

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.