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).

Creation Story

Where is god? In the river. god in the water you drink. god in the rain
in every droplet of ocean and in each gravel of sand. god refracting
rainbows, back from those particles that turn from sand to snow,
when the sunlight falls on them. god inside the big geode, sparkled
with crystals, that sits in a colonizer’s showcase, that you can only
see because it was cracked open. god in the hair strands. Sitting on
gray and brown and black hair. god dancing in threads of the clothing
stitched with the memory of your mother and her mother and her
mother’s mother. god in the food you eat. god in the hands of people
who grow your food and are then shot at, for protesting a lack of food.
For life. For god. god sings in the books you read. god sings in the
books you cannot read. god sings in the sound of the alphabets you
cannot read, especially foreign, especially immigrant. god vibrating
through the holes of the flute. god percussing through the drumskin.
god lives on the trees these days. god the raven. You must know in the
raven of your mind. god is blasphemous and gender neutral and deep
purple. And any attempt at re-creation of god is failure.

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.