The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas

This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas, released by Deep Vellum in 2022.

Iguana Iguana

Key West

Things crawl over me here, no-see-ums and biting
ants. They make me feel hospitable, like at last
I am a good host. Stop itching, I tell myself,
we have guests. What is a guest if not something
that takes a little bit of your life? In the cemetery
where I practice pedaling, sailing circles around
the dead, iguanas sun bake and scurry the white
slabs, the green length of them defiant drapery
in death’s pale parlor. I’m told they’re invasive—
even their taxonomy, iguana iguana, it’s too much,
too many iguanas, the William Carlos Williams
of reptiles, or the man my mother loved after
my father, Jim James, who chugged caffeine-free
Diet Pepsi and made his pecs dance, recited
the three words of Italian he learned from Sylvester
Stallone (Ti amo and andiamo). He once argued
with me over my stubborn belief that ten thousand
was the same thing as one million. I was never good
with numbers. He was never good with kids.
He built things and made my mother laugh. Maybe
too much. Maybe for the wrong reasons. During cold
snaps, the iguanas freeze and fall like stoned fruit
from the trees, wake only once their core
has warmed. I won’t be here to see it—it’s the off-
season now, August, everything dank and hot-
-blooded, which is what I think my mother
liked about Jim: something raw about him,
the pink scars where his own mother’s
boyfriend stubbed out cigarettes on his arms
or how he called Here kitty kitty nightly
into the dark after the cat ran away.
She was a stray to begin with—we lured her
into our lives with milk, named her Fitty Fat
the Kitty Kat, let her eat and fuck and kill
as much as she wanted, litters of kittens
and kibble and dead birds piling up.
What else is there to say but everything
we’ve said before, over and again? Iguana iguana.
Italian Stallion. Here, kitty kitty. Andiamo,
Jim James. What is a child if not something
that takes a little bit of your life? He wasn’t
a bad man. He made my mother laugh.

Caylin Capra-Thomas is the author of Iguana Iguana (Deep Vellum), as well as the chapbook Inside My Electric City (YesYes Books), and her poems and nonfiction have appeared in venues like Pleiades, Copper Nickel, New England Review, 32 Poems, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Studios of Key West, she was the 2018-2020 poet-in-residence at Idyllwild Arts Academy. She lives in Columbia, Missouri, where she studies nonfiction, poetry, and ecocriticism in Mizzou’s PhD program, but she calls New England home.

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas

This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas, released by Deep Vellum in 2022.

Put All That Down Now. Back Away.

Forgive.

Forgive the days their relentless arrival. Accept
their storms as your prophets,

their waters’ soft violence.
Forgive the water. Forgive

the clouds their roaming forms.
In another version, oblivion

came for you—more than a passing
notion. Forgive her.

You, you can learn to move on.
See—overhead, the migration:

sandhill cranes spiraling up, up—
harsh, rolling gargle of calls

crowns the color of rusted blood,
and knife-sharp whitish wings, glinting.

Forgive them. They waste you.

Caylin Capra-Thomas is the author of Iguana Iguana (Deep Vellum), as well as the chapbook Inside My Electric City (YesYes Books), and her poems and nonfiction have appeared in venues like Pleiades, Copper Nickel, New England Review, 32 Poems, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Studios of Key West, she was the 2018-2020 poet-in-residence at Idyllwild Arts Academy. She lives in Columbia, Missouri, where she studies nonfiction, poetry, and ecocriticism in Mizzou’s PhD program, but she calls New England home.

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas

This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas, released by Deep Vellum in 2022.

Crosscut

So many girls are trying to tell you this:
the line between the hurt body and the body

that hurts is razor-thin and traversable
like the trail we carved into the mountain

to climb beyond the snow line and slip off.
Pain, the happening. Pain, the procedure.

Firewood is not the tree’s submission
but the consequence of being rooted.

One place will cut you down. Girls,
this is not forever. We are not forever,

but we will forever have been here.
Clear-eyed and cross-legged

in the crosscut clearing. Plain-toothed.
Champion-toothed. The woodsman

who walks the forest whistles grateful
tunes to tall specters who arrive

only in the shape of absence, apparition
of light on the needled ground

which once knew only shadow.

Caylin Capra-Thomas is the author of Iguana Iguana (Deep Vellum), as well as the chapbook Inside My Electric City (YesYes Books), and her poems and nonfiction have appeared in venues like Pleiades, Copper Nickel, New England Review, 32 Poems, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Studios of Key West, she was the 2018-2020 poet-in-residence at Idyllwild Arts Academy. She lives in Columbia, Missouri, where she studies nonfiction, poetry, and ecocriticism in Mizzou’s PhD program, but she calls New England home.

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas

This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas, released by Deep Vellum in 2022.

Passage

It’s hard to tell what will be important. The river
is high again and so are the teenagers encrusting
its edges, beady-eyed and black-clad, sideways
glancing, suspicious as crows. Each in the cluster
a dead version of yourself: one scratching peace
signs into the dirt with her toe. One singing
ugly. One poking a drowned worm, expressionless.
And you stand apart, head cocked, remembering
that the French for to happen also means to arrive,
that sometimes we say deceased when we mean
departed. The obscure chorus of your own life
keeps cawing into the diamond dark, under the roaring
of each body you inhabit, the waters, the others
you’ve flocked to, even when all you can hear
are your own hard swallows, or the sweet shriek
of those far-off trains you suspect are coming
to claim you. To lay open the hills you haven’t seen.

Caylin Capra-Thomas is the author of Iguana Iguana (Deep Vellum), as well as the chapbook Inside My Electric City (YesYes Books), and her poems and nonfiction have appeared in venues like Pleiades, Copper Nickel, New England Review, 32 Poems, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Studios of Key West, she was the 2018-2020 poet-in-residence at Idyllwild Arts Academy. She lives in Columbia, Missouri, where she studies nonfiction, poetry, and ecocriticism in Mizzou’s PhD program, but she calls New England home.

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh

This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh, released by Diode Editions in 2022.

Petals

after Jay DeFeo

Nude, you stand before the painting
you will sculpt for another
seven years — your eyes are closed,

your feet apart, your arms spread
like wings about to rise. Rays that you
will chisel into petals

blaze from your body at
the center of a star, the beginnings
of a rose breaking forth —

Teow Lim Goh is the author of two poetry collections, Islanders (2016) and Faraway Places (2021), and an essay collection Western Journeys (2022). Her essays, poetry, and criticism have been featured in The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, and The New Yorker.

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh

This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh, released by Diode Editions in 2022.

Autobiography

And we will not remember everything.
We invent to fill the gaps, to make a story
with which we can live.

We invent: this is who I am.

Teow Lim Goh is the author of two poetry collections, Islanders (2016) and Faraway Places (2021), and an essay collection Western Journeys (2022). Her essays, poetry, and criticism have been featured in The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, and The New Yorker.

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh

This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh, released by Diode Editions in 2022.

Butterfly Pavilion

I stand before the cocoons, waiting
for a twitch in the shells, a crack revealing
a colorful wing. There are none.

The cocoons are pinned
to cork boards, each dangling
from its tip, ordered
by species and country of origin.

Some look like snails.
Some look like tiny black bugs.
Some are the green of the first leaves of spring.

Nothing today.

I turn to the butterflies
around me, broken
out of their shells, dotting the forest
with their bright colors.

They flit from flowers to leaves, pause
on branches, their legs arched,
their wings folded. Once

they lift their wings, they launch into flight.

Teow Lim Goh is the author of two poetry collections, Islanders (2016) and Faraway Places (2021), and an essay collection Western Journeys (2022). Her essays, poetry, and criticism have been featured in The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, and The New Yorker.

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh

This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh, released by Diode Editions in 2022.

Island

Before I was born, the sea rolled up
to my grandparents’ house, but the view
I knew was the strip of asphalt

beyond the barbed wire. The garden
was overgrown with mango, guava,
and jackfruit we picked ripe

off the branches, the sole rambutan
that could not bear fruit, the coconut
decaying from within. I caught

butterflies. I flicked my wrist, pressed
their small brown wings. They left
skeins of powder on my fingers. Then

I let them go. I imagined the sea
rose and flooded the garden. The coconut
fell and bobbed in the waves, too dry

and hard to eat, the shell broken
only by a knife.

Teow Lim Goh is the author of two poetry collections, Islanders (2016) and Faraway Places (2021), and an essay collection Western Journeys (2022). Her essays, poetry, and criticism have been featured in The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, and The New Yorker.

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

Sundress Reads: Review of Asylum

Caroline Cottom’s Asylum (Main Street Rag, 2022) is a soul stirring collection of poems recounting patriarchal violence and its direct connection to the frequency of institutionalization of women in the early 1900’s. This collection tackles the age-old misogynistic term “hysteria” in such an unapologetic way it keeps us flipping page after page to the end, especially with the form of poems like “Asylum 1,” where Cottom deliberately spaces out the words in each stanza to illustrate the experience of looking at the artifacts from the asylum captured by photographer Jon Crispin. This deliberate spacing becomes apparent again in “Girls Underwater,” where she recounts her mother’s plea to have the police called due to the father’s violence. In this piece, she also spaces out the words along the page to imitate the uneasiness associated with hysteria, or fear. 

Interestingly enough, Cottom’s poem “Causes of Mental Illness” list the satirical causes in a perfectly centered page each time, contradicting the erraticism of mental illness itself. This thematically pairs well with the poem before, “Elegy for Cousin Libby,” where Cottom delves into the shock therapy her cousin endured while at asylums in Tennessee and New York. The striking part of this poem is that a piece with so much pain is finely contained on the page as if beaten straight, resembling the one-size-fits-all approach to “treatment” that often left patients robotic and terrified; scared straight. 

Along with the heartwrenching retelling of Cottom’s traumatizing childhood with her sexually abusive father, she unabashedly recounts the history of her experience growing up as a young woman in the 60s before the Equal Rights Amendment of 1972. It only becomes apparent that Cottom is able to have some minor bodily autonomy in “Appetite,” where she reads Nobokov’s Lolita in disgust, but refuses to bring a friend for her father’s tendencies to seep into. Instead, she chooses to be the only one; a selfless act, though gut-wrenching. It’s also incredible how Cottom switches tone throughout the entirety of the collection to show herself growing older and wiser. The tone shift between “Daddy’s Suitcase” (5) and “How I Remembered” (56) stands in stark comparison between the lens of being a little girl and not understanding, to being older and understanding everything. Going from “Two weeks later a russet smear / on a shirt / in his suitcase. Shalimar. Rouge. Blonde hairs / on his suit,” to “In a college basement, a man counsels three women, one after the other. As fate has it, each speaks of being molested as a child by a man she knew well. The third stands in front, lower lip quivering—” is such an excellent way to tell us time has passed without telling us. It’s clear that Cottom is an experienced writer who knows what she’s doing, and her recollection of her experiences is life altering. 

The continuous obituary poem throughout is also a gut punch. “Obituary” shows Cottom unflinchingly recounting what her father was like, and how he treated women in general: her, her sister, her mother, and his many paramours. 

Cottom lists candidly from the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum’s late 1800s hospital records in her recurring poem “Causes of Mental Illness:” “doubt about mother’s ancestors, jealousy, mental excitement, greediness, women, egotism, remorse” (21). The use of the actual text here truly illustrates how bizarre it was that these were considered reasons to institutionalize women (when in reality, it was sexism and an overall hatred of women). It became apparent quickly through Asylum that you could be taken away for virtually anything. The deep empathy woven throughout how Caroline talks about the various asylums (now museums) she visited and/or researched in her life truly stands out—the Willard Asylum in New York, one in Camarillo, California, and one in Northfield, Minnesota. 

Asylum is not only wonderfully written poetry, but a historic analysis into America’s dark history with hospitalizing women who refuse to live in submission. And to all who experienced such horrors at the hands of the people who were supposed to be trusted, it is a simple I see you.

Asylum is available from Main Street Rag

Lyra Thomas is a black nonbinary poet from the St Louis area, currently residing in Carbondale, IL for their MFA in Poetry from Southern Illinois University, which is also their alma mater. They received their BA in Creative Writing in 2018. Lyra enjoys reading/writing poetry, curating Spotify playlists, and cuddling with their cats Max and Silver.

Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents May Reading Series

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is pleased to announce the guests for the May installment of our reading series– writers Mordecia Martin and Shlagha Borah, comedian Liz Brooks, and musician Redd! Join us on Sunday, May 28th at Pretentious Beer Co. from 1:00-3:00PM.

Photo of Mordecai Martin

Mordecai Martin is a queer, Mad, Ashkenazi Jewish writer, an aspiring translator of Yiddish and Spanish, and a fifth generation New Yorker with ties to Philadelphia and Mexico City. In his fiction, he strives to chronicle and capture the peculiarities of voice, the miraculous nature of event, and the depths and edges of Jewish humanity. In his non-fiction he writes to explore family, history, place, and mental illness. His creative non-fiction has appeared in Catapult Magazine, Longleaf Review, Peach Magazine, Autofocus Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine and The Hypocrite Reader. His fiction has been featured in Identity Theory, Timber Journal, X-Ray Lit, Gone Lawn, Knight’s Library Magazine, Funicular, and Sortes. He blogs at mordecaimartin.net and tweets and instagrams @mordecaipmartin. He also conducts interviews for the Poetry Question.

Shlagha Borah (she/her) is a queer poet and mental health activist from Assam, India. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a mental health collective working to make mental health services accessible in India. She currently attends the MFA program in Poetry at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her work centers on parentification, grief, trauma and their intersection as experienced by female bodies and appears in or is forthcoming in Longleaf Review, Rogue Agent, Nonbinary Review, Ninety Seven Poems (Terribly Tiny Tales & Penguin), and elsewhere. Twitter: @shlaghaborah Instagram: @shlaghab

Comedian Liz Brooks has performed across the south East for several years, opening for names like Geoff Tate, and Kevin McDonald. Liz is also a resident and house emcee for Rhinestone Fest as well as being a regular contributor to the BRB podcast. Follow @lizthebruh for more content.

Photo of Redd

Redd is a Knoxville native and former high school English, Yearbook, and Journalism teacher. She also coached cross country and track.  In 2021 Redd’s students pushed her to audition for American Idol, and she placed Top 40. She is now working alongside Gavin, Katie, and Colleen to make music her full time gig.

This event is brought to you in part by a grant provided by the Tennessee Arts Commission. Find out about the important work they do here.

Our community partner for May is the Tennessee Equality Project. The Tennessee Equality Project (TEP) advocates for the equal rights of LGBTQ people in Tennessee. TEP do this through legislative advocacy– meaning they lobby the Tennessee General Assembly and local governments around the state. When there is an important federal issue, like anti-LGBTQ adoption issue language in legislation, TEP helps make your voice heard with your federal officials.

The TEP Foundation provides a variety of educational and organizing programming. They have registered 353 voters online since October 2017. TEP provides workshops called Advocacy 101 across the state so that more people can engage their elected officials. They monitor and analyze state legislation related to the LGBTQ community, gather stories about the impact of state preemption of local government and provide public education on the issue, and hold Boro Pride in Murfreesboro annually, which now attracts over 4000 participants. Their Tennessee Open For Business program recognizes companies that do not discriminate against their employees or customers on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Learn more about the work the Tennessee Equality Project does here!