Category: Wardrobe Best Dressed

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Familiar by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Familiar by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (Madhouse Press 2024).

I dream a night forest4 —
leaves lit by the moon
as bats flit above—mud
splattered calves burn,
but a light glows ahead,
so I follow until I stand
at the edge of a clearing,
watch myself—younger,
but clearly me—crouch
before a fire, feed clothes
worn that day to flames.
For a moment, her eyes
flick up, and she sees us5—
mice in glue, still stuck
here where it happened.







____________
4 “Night is coming, when no one has the power to work,” John
9:1–17.
5 “My delicate firebrand-darlings,” Hopkins, Discovery of Witches.

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (she/her) is the author of Mud In Our Mouths (forthcoming from Northwestern University Press) and Look Alive (winner of the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press), along with numerous chapbooks, most recently Familiar (Madhouse Press, 2024) and The Undead (winner of Sixth Finch Books’ 2020 Chapbook Contest). Her poetry can be found in Fugue, Five Points, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She serves as a Poetry Editor for the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQIA2S+ literary journal and press Foglifter. Her critical work has appeared in Cleaver, Pleiades, The Adroit Journal, and other venues.

Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. 


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney (YesYes Books 2023).

I WOULD SAY

I wake up still
thinking you are alive—
my body gets used to that fog
as if you, as if the dead are nothing more
than bones to the body. That pain is deep—
I will go deeper.
I stayed awake for months after you—
waiting
for your call
come back—people like you don’t just disappear.
I would’ve waited forever
in the solstice cold, up
in the air, mountainside of disbelief if only to hear you say
my name.
Before you, I could not understand pain
but I know it now and it sounds supernatural,
like beams of light
smashed across the small of my back. Sleep and never
sleep again
where did you find yourself when you finally woke?





Did it hurt—?
I mean is death anything like living?
Does it remind you of home?
I hope where you are is vast, real,
impossible—
a better oblivion,
more sky—
I hope where you are is nothing
like home.

Jill Mceldowney (she/her) is the author of the full-length collections Alydar (YesYes Books, forthcoming 2026) and Otherlight (YesYes Books 2023), winner of a North American Book Award. She is found and editor of Madhouse Press. She is a recipient of a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her previously published word can be found in publications such as The Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier, Muzzle, and other notable publications.

Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. 


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney (YesYes Books 2023).

DYNAMITE

A ghost leaves your body and never returns—
this is a lie.

A person has to earn
the right to forget.

What if, from now on,
I subscribe to that specific turn-of-the-century-belief
that illness is caused by spirits—

use this to explain why
I tried to protect your body with mine: My life for yours,
remember?
No matter where that promise would have taken me
I would’ve made it. I would’ve

slept forever for you to live.
I’m sorry I lived

through what you could not.
Do you remember the earth before this earth,

your birthplace on fire?
Now my body is kindling owned by your ghost. If I become anything
let there be no stopping it

let there be grace in living thigh to thigh with ghosts.



That’s the thing about using ghosts as explanations for illness:
you hold them close enough and they become a part of you,

long enough and you forget they are there, they become an apology,
they rip the roof off of the sky.

Jill Mceldowney (she/her) is the author of the full-length collections Alydar (YesYes Books, forthcoming 2026) and Otherlight (YesYes Books 2023), winner of a North American Book Award. She is found and editor of Madhouse Press. She is a recipient of a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her previously published word can be found in publications such as The Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier, Muzzle, and other notable publications.

Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. 


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney (YesYes Books 2023).

TELEPHONE

I am beginning to view the body as a well I could shout Hello Hello into
call it a mistake hang up out of alarm because tell me what you thought
you were doing answering when you’ve been dead five whole years? And is
it really you? How have you kept alive? What have you grown down
there in the gloom of after like salt? Perhaps I should say mine the body
is a salt mine And I never call but you answer anyway Was it ever
cheerful? The sound called ringing Don’t talk to me please
don’t tell me I need you disoriented buried alive clawing your way
up from the mouth of a cave to show me the way home and tell me what
does this even mean?

Tell me to spread open my palms cut another deck of cards face up these
lines arch me far from home I cannot stop from coming my fate are
you what brings me here my annihilating angel? Everyone knows that
when you die you learn everything so tell me about my life Tell me
about my sun line my one day call me bitch I love that hands-on
unmaking and making I must impossibly bloom forth that tallest mountain
I dial the dead and you answer Hand me the telephone give me your ice
your hour of starving your naked promise me I will die dark haired
and one day you and I will burn buildings together for warmth Speak to
me Tell me about me I want to be believed

Jill Mceldowney (she/her) is the author of the full-length collections Alydar (YesYes Books, forthcoming 2026) and Otherlight (YesYes Books 2023), winner of a North American Book Award. She is found and editor of Madhouse Press. She is a recipient of a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her previously published word can be found in publications such as The Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier, Muzzle, and other notable publications.

Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. 


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney (YesYes Books 2023).

DREAM TREE

We are playing that child’s game of guess what I’m saying underwater,

a game of who can stay
submerged longest,
             who can listen longest to the voices of the dead.

You say: Give me your watch. I’ll time you. How long can you hold—?

And how precious is time,
how long wine waits to peak,
how long do we have
              before time fills our love with blood?

I look up at you across the swimming pool and I should not be afraid,
              I can see the bottom of the water
and it is safe and blue and clear
but already you are beginning to blur.

Time takes everything.
Wait with me, wait
for fingers of ice to climb you
the last possible moment
             before rising
                            for air or to leave.

But how could I ever
leave you?



Who better
             knows my gravity? Who will love me knowing
the cost of love is love? Who else
loves me blackout
             drunk, out of my mind, vicious

with this rare, never want this night to end,
with this leave your life,
kind of love?

You bring me wine for my hangovers,
you call me back from
blood on the brain
            when I inhale too much water.

Time long stops the heart
This place
            is the place where you leave me.
I can’t tell what you are shouting into the water
            but the question never was what are you trying to say

it is how long will you stay
knowing all that we are promised is loss.
Promise me

when you think of me
            you will think of me

as the river of light
             you would do anything to cross.
Promise me I will see you again
             even though I will never



see you again. We will never repeat—

               not in the same way,
not exactly,
not when more
               than a swimming pool stands between us.

Each time the dream comes after

I will have less.
I will go back
              to before I saw the sky.

I will take you with me
I will take you back

into this water. I will never move from this where,
this water where
              always

I find you.

Jill Mceldowney (she/her) is the author of the full-length collections Alydar (YesYes Books, forthcoming 2026) and Otherlight (YesYes Books 2023), winner of a North American Book Award. She is found and editor of Madhouse Press. She is a recipient of a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her previously published word can be found in publications such as The Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier, Muzzle, and other notable publications.

Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. 


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Otherlight by Jill Mceldowney (YesYes Books 2023).

BOUND FOR

Lightning so angry half the lights floated
blacked, flickered, came back

            and I filled my bathtub with water in case of a true outage,
an emergency-emergency. Why were you

at the bottom of those pools that—in the dark—
beware me of blood? I look to the water. I see

you clawing at your own throat,

strangers promising
                     He’s in a better place.

          What better—what life
after this—too late

for naloxone, too late for Heaven,

new earth. I sit here perpetually
              inventing lives more terrifying to live—

as if reality were not enough. I hope you never know
how far, how deep
my grief dragged me—the everydayness



of walking empty
                              grocery stores, parking lots, quiet fluorescents,
the quiet telephone.

I think that I am alive—once,

                                                    you said Lobsters,
you said something with their chromosomes,
you said the only thing time does for them is grow—

I think that I am alive now
because you are not.

If there is a world in which the dead speak, let them
tell me what it’s worth—your name
so difficult to say.  

Jill Mceldowney (she/her) is the author of the full-length collections Alydar (YesYes Books, forthcoming 2026) and Otherlight (YesYes Books 2023), winner of a North American Book Award. She is found and editor of Madhouse Press. She is a recipient of a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her previously published word can be found in publications such as The Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, Frontier, Muzzle, and other notable publications.

Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. 


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Noctuary by C. Rees

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Noctuary by C. Rees (Host Publications 2026).

Beside the black poplars

my father ran against his own spectre’d brain   his sadness   his cramped hunger cabinet
kicked the water-logged soccer ball through the acre and back


                        the dead translate our bodies as reeds voice a marsh
          find their way back like fugitive monks from a night we’ve never seen
                        tucked beneath their robes the books they bear are their bodies


          their fingers are long shadows                         their cheeks scuffed as sitting-stones
                        their shoulders torqued like St. Sturgeon suspended from his tree
                                                                            and feet        grandmother’s
                                                                            and feet        worm-worn spars of wood
                                                                            and feet        father’s feet his mother’s tributary
                                                                            the perennial bones
                                                                            unfurl grass through the grass

C. Rees (they/them) is a queer poet and bookseller whose work contends with contamination and complicity, emergent ecologies, hauntings, and porousness. Their first poetry collection, NOCTUARY, will be published by Host Publications in 2026. C. was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenni-Lenape land, and currently lives in Austin, TX, on Comanche, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos land. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.

Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. 


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Noctuary by C. Rees

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Noctuary by C. Rees (Host Publications 2026).

Repeating the names of the dead the names of the dead

I hear that water keeps sound endlessly, a field ringing with voices.

Your names have been lost down the river we grew beside, the river that killed some of us.



Caught like flood debris against the wingdam.


Taking off down the Delaware toward Trenton, and further on to the sea’s ringing vacancy.


Or, like how light through water frays toward darkness and the riverbed.

All of you down there, current.



I open my lips, and water makes me home.

C. Rees (they/them) is a queer poet and bookseller whose work contends with contamination and complicity, emergent ecologies, hauntings, and porousness. Their first poetry collection, NOCTUARY, will be published by Host Publications in 2026. C. was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenni-Lenape land, and currently lives in Austin, TX, on Comanche, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos land. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.

Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. 


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Noctuary by C. Rees

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Noctuary by C. Rees (Host Publications 2026).

River of Lamentation

I grew up swarming for the love of men
who are now mostly old, or dead and naked in dirt.
I find them crawling over old photos, not ghosts,
but hives of caught light.

Faded at 24, Uncle Al in the clutch
of colorized film. He gazes at an open fire.
The river is brackish with summer.

The dead are a kind of grain.
A resident imperfection
                            in life’s material.
In the footage of Reactor 4 Shevchenko shot
three days after the meltdown, radiation opened
its eyes and mouths. It still speaks its life,
and eats the tape. In his photo, my uncle
bears a grain he never did in life.
His eyes distance, his body gone.

Static is the war of the ants,
like the living skull my brother lifted
from the blackberry thicket when we were young.
                                        Ants sutured on it false flesh.
When he threw it back, the thorns raked it naked.
                                        Grains, ants, my grandfather’s eyes,
                         the year before, caught in film, caught before
                         the basement. He died



                                                         in exhaust
                                                                     -ion.
At their funerals I looked for them in the bushes,
but nothing crawled back from dying,
                                                                                   only
                                                                 light.

C. Rees (they/them) is a queer poet and bookseller whose work contends with contamination and complicity, emergent ecologies, hauntings, and porousness. Their first poetry collection, NOCTUARY, will be published by Host Publications in 2026. C. was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenni-Lenape land, and currently lives in Austin, TX, on Comanche, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos land. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.

Catherine Garbinsky (they/she) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. 


The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Noctuary by C. Rees

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Noctuary by C. Rees (Host Publications 2026).

Augury

as the dogwoods told,

                                   a living cousin grew so hungry
                                   he sold his porno magazines and shotgun and collector’s items
                                   his Nintendo and his cheap clothes and still his hunger fumed
                                   he turned on smaller cousins and wolfed them

                 there was fleeing                                 there was chase
                 chaste descriptions of both
                 cousin in the dog in the woods
                 ran so fast its eyes ignited  mad stars in its skull
                 body stretched like grip seeking
                 trees blurred boundaries until
                 there was no difference

a curse courses through this family
for trespass     for living
for no other reason than the rain is pissed
                                          and decides it so

our ravening family’s great-gray-fogbank-miasma sealing us below
                                the driven-under farmer’s field
                                we fall and pool
                                            tease stagnant waters from the water table
                              breed new winged bodies keening for old bloo
our specters never miss a feast         the arras forever torn to reveal



the slaughtered grandfathers spilled like a pot-roast on dirty tiles
the hanged moon
the McMansion’s too-legible portent
foundation licked by housefire
our witness speechless             doused               in carnage            like butter

C. Rees (they/them) is a queer poet and bookseller whose work contends with contamination and complicity, emergent ecologies, hauntings, and porousness. Their first poetry collection, NOCTUARY, will be published by Host Publications in 2026. C. was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenni-Lenape land, and currently lives in Austin, TX, on Comanche, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos land. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.

Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.