Category: Wardrobe Best Dressed

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Bath by Jen Silverman

This selection, chosen by guest editor Katie Manning, is from Bath by Jen Silverman, released by Driftwood Press in 2022.

The Devil Dogs my Steps, but if it Weren’t Him, it Would Just Be Someone Else

1.

The Devil visits the weak of heart.
The Devil makes threats and proposals.
The Devil updates his resume and applies for positions.

2.

The Devil calls on a Monday. I am living in Cincinnati -
if you can call this living. I read bad paperbacks at the laundromat,
and fall down black holes of time. When I emerge, the air is icy
and the cherry trees, bloomed early,
are regretting it.

The Devil lingers outside the CVS.
He was waiting for someone, anyone will do. He says:
Forgot my CVS card, Can I Borrow Yours?
I wait while he buys Advil and socks.
The Devil says: I’m always forgetting something.

The Devil stops by my laundromat to do a load. He says
last time his clothes got nicked. Newspaper under one arm,
he bought an iced coffee that tastes like plastic.
The Devil tells me he’s kinda down:
It just feels a lot harder than it used to.

The Devil and I are walking by my apartment.
The houses are all abandoned here, and the blossoms are deciding
to die. Just because you’re ready doesn’t mean
the world is ready for you, says The Devil.

3.

The Devil peels potatoes. He’s throwing a dinner party. He
invited my landlord and all my exes. The girlfriends and

the boyfriends. He’s serving thick beef, white chocolate,
avocado. The only drink available is rum.

The ex-smokers sit on the fire escape and re-start.
The Devil says we can only talk about religion and politics,

unless anyone wants to discuss what it was like to date me.
My college girlfriend is the first to volunteer.

“You never even know if you’re dating her,” she says.
“She’s so aloof.”

There is also a man from my early twenties. He was balding
and had sad eyes. We never dated, but he raises his hand anyway.

“Her hair just got shorter and shorter,” he tells the room.
When everyone leaves, I do the dishes while The Devil makes

suggestions. The Devil says: Are you generous enough?
The Devil says: Keep your audience in mind.

4.
I go on vacation. The Devil comes along. He isn’t invited per se,
but also,
he isn’t not.

These are the things he brings to my attention:
A greyhound in a turtleneck
A stack of pomegranates
A boy on a yellow bike.

Late at night I sit in the hotel window
and read magazines about people
who felt things,
then acted on those feelings.

The Devil likes to sit in the hotel sauna.
He goes through all the towels.
That is the week he has a bum knee.

A beefy woman at the bar says:
I like to travel because it reminds me
how great it is to come home.

The Devil says:
I like to come home because it reminds me
what a disaster we make
of what’s ours.

Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer and playwright. Jen is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Additional work has appeared in Vogue, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and elsewhere. Jen’s plays have been produced across the United States and internationally. Jen is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Yale Drama Series Award, and a Playwrights of New York Fellowship. Jen also writes for TV and film.

Katie Manning is the author of Hereverent (Agape Editions), Tasty Other (winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award), and six chapbook collections, including How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press) and 28,065 Nights (River Glass Books). Her poem “What to Expect” was featured on the Poetry Unbound podcast, and her poems have appeared in HAD, Poet Lore, SWWIM, Stirring, Thimble, Verse Daily, and many other venues. Katie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Bath by Jen Silverman

This selection, chosen by guest editor Katie Manning, is from Bath by Jen Silverman, released by Driftwood Press in 2022.

Bath 6

(Louisville)

They dropped you in the river. They said
Praise Jesus, Praise Him. You bobbed up

half-drowned. You had seen clearly from
the bottom. Through the silt. Somewhere in

the river mud, you lost your God. So here
we are. And your long bones are light.

You are no longer tethered to this world.
You have un-believed yourself into liberty.

It does not feel like victory, you say,
to go from believing everything to nothing.

You doubt the reality of the sun, the wine,
your own long fingers, the rich moss, ice.

You return to water. Always, the water’s edge.
And I trail after, afraid you’ll stumble in,

reel yourself back to the bottom, back to a
reckoning, your face against the silt, your fingers

combing river-weed. I run you a bath.
I step into it in your stead. I lie at the

bottom, staring up through clear water, toward
the windows. I see nothing,

I see nothing but light.

Jen Silverman is a New York-based writer and playwright. Jen is the author of the debut novel We Play Ourselves and the story collection The Island Dwellers (Random House) which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. Additional work has appeared in Vogue, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and elsewhere. Jen’s plays have been produced across the United States and internationally. Jen is a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, a member of New Dramatists, and the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Yale Drama Series Award, and a Playwrights of New York Fellowship. Jen also writes for TV and film.

Katie Manning is the author of Hereverent (Agape Editions), Tasty Other (winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award), and six chapbook collections, including How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press) and 28,065 Nights (River Glass Books). Her poem “What to Expect” was featured on the Poetry Unbound podcast, and her poems have appeared in HAD, Poet Lore, SWWIM, Stirring, Thimble, Verse Daily, and many other venues. Katie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shlagha Borah, is from Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs, released by Mayapple Press in 2021.

Lavender

I grow among the bitterness of brambles,
unholy desires of fireweed, the silver plan
of hornets. I grow among a gathering
of gladiolas, swelling crowns
of bee-balm, blushes
of the scentless, the psychoses
of roses. I feel the fevers
of lilies, peer inside the freckled throats
of foxgloves. I listen
to the impatience of asters,
the hum of milkweed, troubles
of the snowball flowers,
ginger syllables of zinnias. My loves
lean toward my evergreen, for what
I will remember. I will
remember.

Nancy Takacs’s poetry awards include The Juniper Prize, the 2018 and 2016 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry, Weber’s Sherwin W. Howard Award, a 2020 Pushcart Prize, and a runner-up for the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. She is the author of three other books of poetry and four chapbooks. Nancy lives most of the year in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah, and spends time in Bayfield, Wisconsin, near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, in a small cabin with her husband, poet Jan Minich. Their son Ian Minich is a photographer in Salt Lake City. Nancy is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Utah’s art hub: Helper City.

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears in Salamander, Nashville Review, Identity Theory, Longleaf Review, Variant Literature, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Associate Poetry Editor at Grist. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shlagha Borah, is from Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs, released by Mayapple Press in 2021.

Eating at the Pier

A scallop has two hundred eyes, and here I am
sticking a fork into one, my tongue

running over the soft groove where the cook
pulled the ligament, as I eye the serene green

backs of the Apostle Islands, hear what sounds like
a whooping crane. Some of us have guided cranes

with an ultralight a thousand miles back to their nests.
Sometimes we can be earnest in saving animals,

for even one to have babies. We recognize wildness
though not usually in ourselves. There are no verses

here for man or woman who’s boiled a live lobster.
Tonight the sky is so clear it will soon be irised with stars,

and we’ll immediately think of heaven, of eyes.
We’re civilized. Eyes watch us from the sky,

the tanks, the deep. I swallow another scallop,
maybe the last eyes I will ever eat.

Nancy Takacs’s poetry awards include The Juniper Prize, the 2018 and 2016 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry, Weber’s Sherwin W. Howard Award, a 2020 Pushcart Prize, and a runner-up for the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. She is the author of three other books of poetry and four chapbooks. Nancy lives most of the year in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah, and spends time in Bayfield, Wisconsin, near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, in a small cabin with her husband, poet Jan Minich. Their son Ian Minich is a photographer in Salt Lake City. Nancy is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Utah’s art hub: Helper City.

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears in Salamander, Nashville Review, Identity Theory, Longleaf Review, Variant Literature, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Associate Poetry Editor at Grist. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shlagha Borah, is from Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs, released by Mayapple Press in 2021.

Fossil Fish

each an eye-shape
with the half-shine
of a fingernail
over blue spines,
faces pointed
in the life that has
become them,
harbored in mud they
couldn’t swim out of,
sideways in the last
of that warm sea
dried up a million
years ago. If my
mother were alive
and here with me,
she would think
of the inlet where
she and my father
brought a bucket
of killies, some days
they baited their lines,
and never argued.

Nancy Takacs’s poetry awards include The Juniper Prize, the 2018 and 2016 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry, Weber’s Sherwin W. Howard Award, a 2020 Pushcart Prize, and a runner-up for the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. She is the author of three other books of poetry and four chapbooks. Nancy lives most of the year in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah, and spends time in Bayfield, Wisconsin, near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, in a small cabin with her husband, poet Jan Minich. Their son Ian Minich is a photographer in Salt Lake City. Nancy is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Utah’s art hub: Helper City.

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears in Salamander, Nashville Review, Identity Theory, Longleaf Review, Variant Literature, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Associate Poetry Editor at Grist. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shlagha Borah, is from Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs, released by Mayapple Press in 2021.

Making Up

is like the first pickle from a mason jar,
raspberry jam in the tapioca. My husband
speaks to me for the first time after our
argument that shimmered with hooves.
Now his voice is all hallowed and velour.
Now my voice is hazy and mango. We halt
our sorrows for now. We go out to the tulips
and have a cookie. I put on my magenta
sweatshirt. The dusky sky has one tamp of bitter.
Holding a hand can be like a hornet in a balloon.
It takes two hours for our toes to get drowsy.

Nancy Takacs’s poetry awards include The Juniper Prize, the 2018 and 2016 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry, Weber’s Sherwin W. Howard Award, a 2020 Pushcart Prize, and a runner-up for the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. She is the author of three other books of poetry and four chapbooks. Nancy lives most of the year in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah, and spends time in Bayfield, Wisconsin, near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, in a small cabin with her husband, poet Jan Minich. Their son Ian Minich is a photographer in Salt Lake City. Nancy is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Utah’s art hub: Helper City.

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears in Salamander, Nashville Review, Identity Theory, Longleaf Review, Variant Literature, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Associate Poetry Editor at Grist. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shlagha Borah, is from Dearest Water by Nancy Takacs, released by Mayapple Press in 2021.

Spell to Banish a Ghost

At night I hear Anna
snipping toenails
in my wicker chair,
smell her cologne,
Ambush.

Once my favorite aunt,
she whispered to me
with venom
when I was twenty
she never liked me
because I was born
last in our family
and took her place.

She died alone
last October
with a brain tumor.

She eyes me in sink water
from my mother’s dishes,
her blue face in their lilies,
her earrings like onions.

She cocks her head,
skinny robin on my side-mirror,
then craps on my door handle.

So tonight on this quarter moon,
I make a fire.
I find my red frying pan,
fill it with lavender oil
and wait till it hisses.

I hold my only picture of her,
write her name on the back of it,
and kiss it three times.

Nancy Takacs’s poetry awards include The Juniper Prize, the 2018 and 2016 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry, Weber’s Sherwin W. Howard Award, a 2020 Pushcart Prize, and a runner-up for the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. She is the author of three other books of poetry and four chapbooks. Nancy lives most of the year in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah, and spends time in Bayfield, Wisconsin, near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, in a small cabin with her husband, poet Jan Minich. Their son Ian Minich is a photographer in Salt Lake City. Nancy is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Utah’s art hub: Helper City.

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears in Salamander, Nashville Review, Identity Theory, Longleaf Review, Variant Literature, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Associate Poetry Editor at Grist. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Of the Forest by Linda Ferguson

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shlagha Borah, is from Of the Forest by Linda Ferguson, released by The Poetry Box in 2022.

content warning for suggestion of child sexual assault

Of the Forest

Maybe I was in my room after school.
Maybe I was erasing my answer to a math problem.
Maybe I was eating the tuna sandwich I couldn’t swallow at lunch.
Maybe I was on my feet, arms stretched, neck long, pretending I was a swan.

Maybe I heard him approach.
Maybe he slunk in like a wolf, smelling of bruises and bent nails.
Maybe a small brown bear crouched beside him, smelling of wool and berries and warm earth.
Maybe the wolf and bear said I was a bird.
Maybe they said I should pluck off all my feathers for them: the plaid wool, the cable knit, the cotton.

Maybe the wolf and bear circled.
Maybe they smiled.
Maybe I shrank.
Maybe I froze.
Maybe I said no and no and no.
Maybe they shrugged and left me alone: safe, untouched, a trifle.

Maybe I cowered on my rose-print bed.
Maybe I called for them to come back.
Maybe they pretended not to hear.
Maybe I wasn’t worth the trouble.
Maybe I was pampered, privileged, put up on a pedestal by an adoring father.
Maybe I was weak, ugly, uncoordinated, prevaricating, a liar.

Maybe I imagine things today.
Maybe I think I’m the blur of a hummingbird’s wings,
but I’m really a crow’s bristling beak pecking at soggy French fries in the street.
Maybe there’s blood on my claws and carrion caught between my teeth.

Maybe I’m in a cage.
Maybe I built the cage myself.
Maybe there are three hundred locks on the door of the cage but no key.
Maybe there’s one lock and three hundred keys.
Maybe, when I’m hungry enough, I’ll bite my way through the cage’s iron bars.
Maybe, when I’m strong enough, I’ll kick open its door.
Maybe, when I’m loud enough, I’ll howl in the presence of bears and wolves.
Maybe, when I’m reckless enough, I’ll ask to see their hidden scars.
Maybe, if I live long enough, I’ll move among my fellow creatures
with an easy breath and a long spine, inhabiting the forest
that’s theirs and yours and also mine.

A five-time Pushcart nominee, Linda Ferguson is a writer of poetry, fiction and essays. Her chapbook Of the Forest was the 2nd place winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021, and another collection, Not Me: Poems About Other Women, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2022. 

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears in Salamander, Nashville Review, Identity Theory, Longleaf Review, Variant Literature, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Associate Poetry Editor at Grist. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Of the Forest by Linda Ferguson

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shlagha Borah, is from Of the Forest by Linda Ferguson, released by The Poetry Box in 2022.

Love Song 2

for my husband

							Some things I love aren’t green – 

oatmeal’s cinnamon steam 
juice of peach, single strawberry 
easy breaths of blue bedroom 
moon-gray shoes 
with laces of velvet ink 
scrape and burn of crow’s caw 
the gleam of Gram’s onyx ring 
dreamy depths of our daughter’s 
azure paintings 
and our son’s red-gold hair 
somehow spun from the straw of our genes— 

							but your voice— 

all sprouts and fronds 
and stirring seeds, laughing leaves, 
echo of bells over the hills – 
up and down and around we go 
every morning, the new, green tips 
of possibility.

A five-time Pushcart nominee, Linda Ferguson is a writer of poetry, fiction and essays. Her chapbook Of the Forest was the 2nd place winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021, and another collection, Not Me: Poems About Other Women, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2022. 

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears in Salamander, Nashville Review, Identity Theory, Longleaf Review, Variant Literature, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Associate Poetry Editor at Grist. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Of the Forest by Linda Ferguson

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shlagha Borah, is from Of the Forest by Linda Ferguson, released by The Poetry Box in 2022.

Camping, Circa 1970

My chocolate-eyed brother croons to me from his sleeping bag.

Sprinkle of pine needles on the roof of our blue tent. Canvas walls a lullaby cradling the ghost of marshmallow smoke.

Eyes closed, I see a cinnamon tree stump perched on the hill beyond.

My brother says the stump is a small bear.

I want it to be a bear. I want to rest my cheek against the bear’s side and feel his warm ribs rising.

I want to hold all the bear’s sighs in my arms.

I want him to sing to me all my life.

A five-time Pushcart nominee, Linda Ferguson is a writer of poetry, fiction and essays. Her chapbook Of the Forest was the 2nd place winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2021, and another collection, Not Me: Poems About Other Women, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2022. 

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a poet from Assam, India. Her work appears in Salamander, Nashville Review, Identity Theory, Longleaf Review, Variant Literature, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and is an Associate Poetry Editor at Grist. She has received support for her work from Brooklyn Poets and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India.