The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Mother Wound by Gauri Awasthi

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor dez brown, is from Mother Wound by Gauri Awasthi (Trio House Press 2026).

Failed Elegy

Poem in which he does not die
by drowning or otherwise.
In which his mother reaches

just in time to wade into the center
of the pool and finds, a pulse in his wrists,
pulls him out and performs CPR
that she learnt just last week. In which she is not
driving to pick me up from the airport
and gets a call from grandfather
halfway to her destination, announcing
something has happened to the child,
come fast. And nothing so bad
actually happens. Maybe we learn he just fell
in the bathroom and bruised his arm
like babies do. But his mother panics,
and she panic calls me, who panic calls
grandfather again. Poem in which
his mother is not crying with me
on the phone, saying:
It was a little too late, to reach home.
In which she isn’t describing
an unusual number of ambulances parked
outside the house. In which we only discuss
theoretically, what a nightmare can be. And we pray
knowing what those many ambulances mean.

Suppose he lives. Suppose he goes to school again.
Suppose I give him balloons on his mother’s birthday.
Suppose I get to hug him too. Suppose I get to never write this poem.

Gauri Awasthi (she/her) is an Indian writer who has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Hambidge Center, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, and SAFTA. She lives in New York City, where she edits, teaches creative writing, and makes films. Her poetry collection, Mother Wound, is forthcoming from Trio House Press in October 2026 and was on the Ms. Magazine list of the Best Poetry of 2025 and 2026.

dr. dez brown (they/he), publishing as dezireé a. brown, is a Black queer nonbinary and transmasculine Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and interdisciplinary scholar, born and raised in Flint, MI. Their debut collection of poetry, they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming, was the winner of the Joe W. Bratcher Prize and a finalist for the 2026 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Often claiming to have been born with a poem written across his chest, he spends much of his time gaming and plays a mean hand of spades. Follow them online at @deziree.the.writer.