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).

Another Ocean

As the waves recede,
you hold on to my knee,
strands of seaweed

hugging your heel,
your hair full of wind,
sand shimmering on skin.

Then you flee from me,
chasing gulls and other things
that elude my grasp.

You are water, wild
as weather––you have become
another ocean.

Soon you will sleep
in my arms under a thin towel
and seem small again.

Awash in relief, I will
watch the water turn from
aqua to navy to grey.

I will watch as a seal,
dark and elegant,
skirts the shore

with an eye toward us,
then wish you awake again
to see it.

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.