Category: Wardrobe Best Dressed

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: One Way to Listen by Asa Drake

This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from One Way to Listen by Asa Drake, released by Gold Line Press in 2022.

I Don’t Know How to Talk About Racism, so I Call
My Mother About the Indispensable Pleasure of
Material Things

It is night in my house. I imagine one room
safer than the rest. Other people really do exist,

and this is not a comfort. Tonight I have
no terrible news. This week my lover

works late, so the windows overwhelm
their steel frames, opening. This week I look

like my mother in the daytime, drawstring shorts,
red scrunchie, planting lemongrass and ginger

borders, bromeliads in the trees. I hear a lot
of people move south these days for that. Mom

down in Coral Gables instagramming her vandas
because an orchid isn’t an orchid, it’s specific.

Look down on the species. Tell which leaves
signify expense, and none will last my life.

No need, but the woman tonight, to file her SSN,
she lived through her ages twice. I hear even

the SSN isn’t eternal, so tonight, the woman
is anyone I love too much to bring attention to.

She says the fear keeping me up is my dream
where the lotus paste vanishes, the animals

are small but endless, and I am looking for
the one I own. I don’t want to go further.

She’s just closed on her house. Neither of us know
if the things we buy will last our lives. I want to know

dreams without worry. I ask my lover what he dreams.
He dreams our windows are in the Midwest. They are broken.

In the dream, he can’t find our insurance. Like all
monthly recurrences, I keep the insurance to myself.

Asa Drake is a Filipina American poet and writer in Central Florida. She has received fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her chapbook, One Way to Listen (2023), was selected by Taneum Bambrick as the winner of Gold Line Press’s 2021 Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her most recent poems can be found in The American Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape and Waxwing.

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: One Way to Listen by Asa Drake

This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from One Way to Listen by Asa Drake, released by Gold Line Press in 2022.

A Co-worker Asks if I’m Superstitious

No, but there’s only so much salt water anyone can swallow.

Asa Drake is a Filipina American poet and writer in Central Florida. She has received fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her chapbook, One Way to Listen (2023), was selected by Taneum Bambrick as the winner of Gold Line Press’s 2021 Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her most recent poems can be found in The American Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape and Waxwing.

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: One Way to Listen by Asa Drake

This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from One Way to Listen by Asa Drake, released by Gold Line Press in 2022.

When A Man Sleeps with My Effigy

Another insists my best protection is property
survey flags, annexed easements, an exterior
not given over to motion. In the aisles
of the early 2000s, I would not have anticipated
my house dress going viral, thus selling out,
thus becoming so ubiquitous to dress an effigy.
A man shows me his purchase and explains
he has named it after me. Do I say this is not my body?
If that is not enough, I go inside, house myself
in accumulation so precious as to have survived
eight apartments. Wrap my actual body in knife pleats
set each week by a lover’s hand. Shimmy
into inherited brocade, smocked stiff as the grave.
This is not to say an effigy cannot be made,
but what is a body rendered without detail,
and I am a woman who hates to be naked.

Asa Drake is a Filipina American poet and writer in Central Florida. She has received fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her chapbook, One Way to Listen (2023), was selected by Taneum Bambrick as the winner of Gold Line Press’s 2021 Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her most recent poems can be found in The American Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape and Waxwing.

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: One Way to Listen by Asa Drake

This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from One Way to Listen by Asa Drake, released by Gold Line Press in 2022.

Letter to My Younger Self

When I see men digging clay beside the confederate
monument, I want to know if this is where we bury
unspecific history. Make it look easy.

Lately, I worry. Today I was told
most mixed-race women die in fiction, which implies
that the living version of myself is difficult

for others to imagine. Today a crossing light,
swallowed by the rainy season, joined the number
of things I’ve touched that fall into sinkholes. All space

I didn’t know I was risking. I worry a great deal
about the unimportant ways you busy your hands.
Get thee to a dry cleaner, my love.

Let someone else play human. The woman behind me
can’t stand to look. Who could do that every day, she says,
like each night I boil moths myself and spin silk.

Asa Drake is a Filipina American poet and writer in Central Florida. She has received fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her chapbook, One Way to Listen (2023), was selected by Taneum Bambrick as the winner of Gold Line Press’s 2021 Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her most recent poems can be found in The American Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape and Waxwing.

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani

This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani, released by Perugia Press in 2023.

POSSIBLE CONSOLATION OF A BRAIN SCAN’S TOPOGRAPHY

On the scan: a flattened ridge, a valley grown wide—
a smoothness that explains

the gaps.

My father and I took a road trip once—
California through the Rockies
to the Great Plains.

The outer layer of his brain
is like Nebraska, where I
live now.

I could find comfort in this:
flat land surrounds me,
blanketed with corn.

He doesn’t remember the trip,
but he’s here with me
anyhow.

Carolina Hotchandani is a Latinx/South Asian poet born in Brazil and raised in various parts of the United States. Her debut poetry collection The Book Eaters won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize and was released in September 2023. Hotchandani holds degrees from Brown, Texas State, and Northwestern universities. Her honors include scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Community of Writers, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska, where she lives with her husband and daughter. 

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani

This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani, released by Perugia Press in 2023.

HOW CAN IT BE—

my father reaching for a peach
when he ate two in the last hour.
Satiation depends on the memory
of eating, I learn. My mother 
scolds him: two dozen 
mandarins, bought yesterday,
are gone. What my father needs
is to be fed the past. I try. 
Here is my recollection of your meal: 
here, my immaterial crumbs 
of your morning bread. Pierce, 
with a fork’s tines, this slice of melon 
I make of words and offer 
to a mind that keeps rumbling. 
Time’s become a food 
your body can’t digest.

Carolina Hotchandani is a Latinx/South Asian poet born in Brazil and raised in various parts of the United States. Her debut poetry collection The Book Eaters won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize and was released in September 2023. Hotchandani holds degrees from Brown, Texas State, and Northwestern universities. Her honors include scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Community of Writers, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska, where she lives with her husband and daughter. 

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani

This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani, released by Perugia Press in 2023.

THE BOOK EATERS

My envy of the insects took me by surprise.

Whether they spotted “a spike of wheat”
or “the barren soil” in a field of words,
they found no difference:

The letter became a crumb.
The sentence became a loaf.

Blank margins metamorphosed into a soil
ever-fecund, ever-teeming with crops
as larval bodies translated
pages into food and themselves
into the winged stage.

As the baby drinks my milk,
I read. I wait to harvest
from ideas my sustenance.

I wait for my new selves to come.

Carolina Hotchandani is a Latinx/South Asian poet born in Brazil and raised in various parts of the United States. Her debut poetry collection The Book Eaters won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize and was released in September 2023. Hotchandani holds degrees from Brown, Texas State, and Northwestern universities. Her honors include scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Community of Writers, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska, where she lives with her husband and daughter. 

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani

This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani, released by Perugia Press in 2023.

REAL ESTATE

In class, a student of mine quotes Heidegger:
Every man is born as many men 
and dies as a single one. 
He moves on, pontificates on poetry,
claiming the air around us—
an estate he’ll soon inherit. 
My mind can’t register the new sounds
his mouth makes as I think of every woman 
I know and whether Heidegger’s aphorism 
applies. I am a professor and new mother 
who hears the boy say, Heidegger said, 
and he becomes Heidegger as well as himself, 
while I am one woman in the middle 
of all the men making word sounds.

Carolina Hotchandani is a Latinx/South Asian poet born in Brazil and raised in various parts of the United States. Her debut poetry collection The Book Eaters won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize and was released in September 2023. Hotchandani holds degrees from Brown, Texas State, and Northwestern universities. Her honors include scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Community of Writers, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska, where she lives with her husband and daughter. 

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani

This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani, released by Perugia Press in 2023.

PORTRAIT OF APHASIA ON A BURNISHED MOON

Was it not then, as you thudded over memory’s potholes
embarrassed for swerving too late, I searched for ways 
that your forgetting echoed mine. A word effaced itself 
in a conversation, I told you, and then I caught a glimpse
of my idea’s underside, like a deer the darkness hid
 till the moon appeared and all I saw was movement. 
A flash of being. It was the word “eclipse,” of all words, 
that escaped me like that furtive deer—its hind legs 
springing over brush. I was left with the white tail 
of a thought in a sentence: The moon moved 
into the Earth’s shadow, which surrounded my idea 
while obscuring it, the way the conifer forest 
embraces the deer while sheltering it from human eyes. 
Pine needles must have brushed my fragile thought as it left me
and I flushed, like that strange and rare and reddish moon.

Carolina Hotchandani is a Latinx/South Asian poet born in Brazil and raised in various parts of the United States. Her debut poetry collection The Book Eaters won the 2023 Perugia Press Prize and was released in September 2023. Hotchandani holds degrees from Brown, Texas State, and Northwestern universities. Her honors include scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Community of Writers, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Her poetry has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska, where she lives with her husband and daughter. 

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Heirloom by Ashia Ajani

This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from 
Heirloom by Ashia Ajani, released by Write Bloody Publishing in 2023.

after my shoe spreads the guts of an unassuming earthworm across a crosswalk didn’t it just want to breathe didn’t it just want to dance in the rain too

A body can be a prison if you let it.
Fanon calls a puddle an ecosystem minutes before a boot
disperses its wet contents. Split tongues emerge from the
fragments, eager to taste what lingers on the sole.
Power is the difference. This is a food chain, after all,
begging us to spin sustenance from scarce dew droplets.
Dark, wet continents fall from our hips, waiting to be caged
once the dust settles.
Small pond, small body, it must be so heartbreaking to
see yourself reflected in every iris that passes you over;
a well of emotion, motionless til the heat of summer
evaporates you into the invisible everythingness that surrounds us.
Just as the dehydrated hips of hibiscus widened
when met with moisture, so too shall you unfold past
short-lived habitats. Change accumulates languidly like
condensation. In the ancient sludge of existence,
                                   you

                                                                disperse

                                                                                                 endlessly.

Ashia Ajani is a sunshower hailing from Denver, CO, (unceded Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapahoe land), now living in Oakland (unceded Ohlone land). A lecturer in the AfAm Department at UC Berkeley and a climate justice educator with Mycelium Youth Network, Ajani has received fellowships from Just Buffalo Literary Center, Tin House, The Watering Hole and others. Their words have appeared in Sierra, Atmos, World Literature Today, Frontier Poetry, & elsewhere. Ajani is co-poetry editor of the Hopper Literary Magazine and a Fall 2023 Poet in Residence at SF MoAD. Their debut poetry collection, Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing), dropped April 2023.

Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.