The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Reading Berryman to the Dog by Wendy Taylor Carlisle (Belle Point Press 2023).

Notes for a Childhood I

i.

Words with no meanings—
hibiscus, yes, bougainvillea, croton
and the others, trade winds, Sergeant Majors.
At the edge of the known the octopus
turned inside-out to pink, the nuns
who comb our tangled hair each afternoon
on the porch. Octo is eight,
says mamma and the nuns are named
Sister Owen Phillip, Sister Immaculata.
Even the saccharine smell under the rubber
cone has a name: ether. I need
a word for my hand, for a certain
sort of skin that, surface warm, contains
such cold I shiver every time I look.

ii.

Without looking she slung her forearm
across my middle in those days before
seatbelts when she careened up to
each stop sign as if it would melt
under her cold eye. No.
They always stayed put and warranted
that arm athwart the front seat,
the reliable OOF of a small unwilling chest,
its air puffed out, and God help us
if I hit the dash—the metal hard as sin—
and wore the bruise because of her slow arm
too late to save me. From mamma, I learn
to race toward whatever stops us hating it,
slamming the brakes at the last instant.

iii.

An instant of twirling, hair slung in slow motion,
skirt a vivid absence of color spun out
in abundant circles like the hub of a childhood,
chestnut and sharkskin in that perfect moment
of turning. No screaming. No sweet, sick smell.
No veins on her neck pulsing. Instead,
mamma spins, arms held out like the wings on a B52,
slim fingers curled in, palming the secret
of what a hand might do. Beautiful. Silent.
Turning in the land of ’47 Chevys, Eisenhower
and the GI Bill. Like America after the war,
running right up to the edge,
her breath jarred loose by Buck Rogers,
her future flung forward into decades of fists.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks and is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for her fourth book, The Mercy of Traffic. 


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Astronauts by Amy Miller

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Astronauts by Amy Miller (Beloit Poetry Journal 2022).

Radio Silence

That place had the biggest yard. I lost myself in it, warrens and wire cages, beans looping quiet up their poles. The cat slept in a forest of corn. I told myself my raging sister and I had landed on different planets, that’s all, our signals blocked by moons and storms and boyfriend satellites. One of us might come home a hundred years older. I liked being the only human there. My sister deep in some ocean while I pulled carrots up from a thin surviving crust. I hadn’t imagined this world. Science thought of everything here—music wafting from a silver disc, a vertical curved screen that wrote any book I thought of. You would love this, I wanted to tell her. But her world was somewhere else. My radio wasn’t broken. It sat in perfect working order. I stayed outside and dug so deep in that garden that I found another civilization. At night I talked to the lamp and heated soup on the only burner that worked. I made terrible beginner’s bread and froze half of it for the journey I knew was coming.

Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Recipient of a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR regional listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Astronauts by Amy Miller

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Astronauts by Amy Miller (Beloit Poetry Journal 2022).

The Story

My sister does this thing with the telephone. Turns it into an extraction device, a many-pronged grabber that snakes through the line and comes out my earpiece. It’s tiny. It only takes a memory, a flash of pain, then whisks it back to her end where she puts it under a microscope. I can tell she has a little piece when she starts asking questions: But didn’t you want to kill him? Did you suspect he was doing that? She’s reading the dyed cells of my brain, and that slice on the slide is now hers, a thing she can catalog and reread and bring out whenever she needs a small lever, a shocking little photo. I collect pieces of her too, pictures of the mountains of boxes in her house, her TV’s watering eye, the city of lost artifacts on her coffee table. I need these things of hers to use—anti, voodoo, autoimmune. Even our blood is in battle. Every time I lose some, she knows it and has to hear. The story is better than the blood.

Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Recipient of a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR regional listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Astronauts by Amy Miller

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Astronauts by Amy Miller (Beloit Poetry Journal 2022).

Silly Putty

When she went to the bathroom, someone replaced her with a pod of Silly Putty. The hands looked normal enough when she came back, idle on the dinner table, but were clearly unset clay when they tried to lift the bowl of beans. It was a darned good likeness, but they didn’t get the hair quite right, more scalp than I remembered, and overall, too much of everything, ears suddenly long and flat, eyelids not quite fit to the sockets, sour mouth that could eat a table whole. And the skin—smudged and gray, imprinted backward with every insult she thought I’d said, so later she could look in a mirror and relive them.

Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Recipient of a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR regional listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Astronauts by Amy Miller

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Astronauts by Amy Miller (Beloit Poetry Journal 2022).

Astronauts

The first rule is: don’t answer the phone.
The people of Earth may try to call.
We smoke the alien PCP then float
down the airlock of the stairway and stop
before we reach the neighbors’ window where
their father lies all day in his hospital bed
so he can see the birds.

We turn and climb the lunar hill
back up to the ship. Even then, gravity’s
a joke—broken, with heads and feet
floating on thin tethers. I wear my moon boots,
hand-stitched from ripstop and down, a kit
I got in the mail, which always

make us laugh—outlandishly large,
their canvas soles swishing on the carpet.
We walk a minimal-G ballet, slo-mo arms.
No music: that would only confuse
our synapses already snapping and swelling.
We’ll have a half hour if the dose

was right. If too much, we’ll die over and over,
trapped in our suits. I remember stories
of guys jumping from rooftops, of the hearts
of fifteen-year-old girls stilled to motionless
fists. My own heart hammers on its pipe
in the empty black. We’ll have

about a year of space walks before
the oxygen effervesces its bright little blades
and carves the wrong initials in my brain.
We’ll never speak of this.
We can’t love our alien selves forever.
That file is sealed, even to us.

Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Recipient of a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR regional listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

Sundress Reads: Review of Dead Uncles

I’ve read many poetry books written by Southern and Appalachian authors, and I can confidently say that Ben Kline’s chapbook, Dead Uncles (Driftwood Press, 2021), is fifty-one pages of some of the most painfully beautiful, goosebump-raising writing sourced straight from the hollers of Appalachia. In these pages, readers will walk across the land of not just the dead, but those walking beautiful, often painful lives. Through Kline’s sharp words, anyone can learn about the magic of blood ties, family origins, and the special connection such ideas share. 

Set against the backdrop of a community in the throes of addiction and loss, many of the poems in the collection ruminate on death and identity. In “Dead at 46,” Kline writes about the inevitability of the end: 

If I die that Wednesday afternoon– 
another distant uncle gone– 
I hope it doesn’t hurt, 
hope I hover embryonic, 
a meteoric ghost burning up 
no closer to heaven. (21)

Like shears, Kline’s harshly vivid descriptions tear through the fibers of what it means to truly live while also trying to survive and prepare for the end. Every uncle, including the “distant uncle” in “Dead at 46,” is a mirror for the speaker to look into, a reflection of true familial experience, be it 100% factual or slightly exaggerated for the sake of its poetic purpose. In these poems, readers will find unedited people reduced to their very core, and a speaker who dares to tell their stories.  

The theme of queerness is another axis on which these poems spin; the poem “Will / Inherit,” is a prime example of how Kline explores this: “Suddenly / late summer / shirtless in the loft / he watches me / surmount the top rug / Soft timothy exhaling June / The twine breaks / spreading blue / purple florets on which we lie” (9). The use of colors in this poem spark images in the reader’s mind, pulling us into the speaker’s own world of sexual desire and companionship. The poem ends with the speaker pondering the “silver rings my nephews will inherit / as we leave / behind nothing.” I would argue that the title’s reference to inheritance, which is revisited at the end of the poem, could also be read as an inheritance of struggle for LGBTQ+ people. What we leave behind as individuals are not just physical things like rings, but also the intangible, the fight for our rights, for safety, to be seen and heard. We leave behind the wondering, hoping that two men holding hands in public will one day be safe. 

Although this collection exists as its own little regional ecosystem, universal ideas are relayed in nearly every poem. Take “Be Prepared,” for example, a poem that uses a hungered robin and an earthworm to describe the desperation of survival. Kline writes, “In the bluegrass an earthworm thrashes / toward God,” and “Home, I splash cold water on my face / and check the packed bag / under the bed” (16). The natural cycle of the food chain echoes the speaker’s preparedness throughout the entirety of the collection, which takes form in literal acts of preparation for death and in preparing other things, like a concoction of ingredients to conjure past lovers. These lines from “Giving Up the Dew” stand out as an example: “Once home repeat those lovers’ names / three times as you drool / your weed cup into the second / and fifth cups. Wash your hands” (12). With every poem, there is something to be said about how Kline uses simplistic poetic forms to explore the complicated intersectionality of fatalism, queerness, and rural life alongside connective thematic threads, such as identity exploration and love.   

The final poem in the collection, “Corpse Reviver,” is a summation of the pain and love that this collection embodies as it pulls us back to uncles: 

uncle Rick counting pills, placing them
in neat rows. No amount of knowing 
changes the outcome: dead uncles
blue in the face, red 
leaving their lips. (Kline 29)

Kline’s colorful, tragic words here are an ode to the uncles that have come and gone, those too soon and others not soon enough. What the reader sees here is not just a tragic ending, but a reminder that no matter what is experienced throughout one’s life, there is only one way in which things truly end. Much like its last poem, Dead Uncles is a reunion—a place where the dead, the living, memory, folklore, and daydreams collide. If there’s one place where all of these family members, and especially these uncles, will live forever, it is in these poems. Anyone from anywhere can read this collection and walk away having felt it in their bones.

Dead Uncles is available from Driftwood Press

Leo Coffey is a trans fiction writer born and raised in Southern Appalachia. His stories engage with class distinctions, rural life, gender identity and sexuality, and the tension between memory and reality. He earned his BA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Asheville. His work has appeared in Still: The Journal, Appalachian Review, and Dead Mule. He is the fiction co-editor for Reckon Review. 

Meet Our New Intern: Hedaya Hasan

A brown woman is posing to the side in a greenhouse with a tall green plant. She is wearing a black hijab, varsity jacket, blue jeans, and red handbag.

My first passion was reading. I did all the things keen readers do, though “keen” would not even begin to describe my addiction. Visits to the library became a weekly ritual. I grew hard muscles in my small arms from the heavy bags of books I carried home with me. I read when I wasn’t allowed to; late-night reading earned me more than one scolding and my teachers complained that I kept my nose to my books instead of paying attention. I read myself into deep headaches, completely blocking out the world around me before lifting myself to do something trivial like eat. I outgrew my supposed reading level and was moved to an advanced reading group at school before I outgrew that as well. None of my classmates could believe me when I announced that I had finished reading the Harry Potter series after starting it just two or three weeks earlier. The smartest girl in class was still on the fourth book after laboring through the series for two months which, according to grade-schooler logic, made me the new smartest girl.

I was officially a child prodigy. The kind of child prodigy that excels at one thing more that most people do at a young age but isn’t encouraged enough or given the opportunities or just lacks the verve necessary to carry that genius into adulthood. The older I got, the less impressed people were by my reading compulsion. The class prodigy label was slipping as I began to stray into teacher’s pet and know-it-all territory. I was no longer special. Not only that, but I was insignificantly average. In a desperate attempt to be praised and included, I slowly turned my eyes to illustration. It wasn’t easy to stray away from my books. In fact, I might have read more than ever during the transition period, though most of what I consumed became about painting or drawing. Being artistic or creative, in any form, is a universally likable trait and is apparently more impressive than being well-read. Any artist can tell you that hearing “I can’t even draw a stick figure” is an inevitable and endlessly repetitive phrase thrown around by the ungifted, unartistic peasants that crowd the human population. Not one single person thought I would pursue anything but illustration.

As it turns out, most things that are born with the intention of serving others stay headed down that route. When the time came for college applications, I very boldly applied to one art school. There was no back up plan for me, which I would come to sorely regret. The summer before I was due to start, I panicked. I had been accepted with a full scholarship and had really enjoyed the tours and orientations. One hot summer day, I opened my bedroom window to take a break from the stale air conditioning. Suddenly, sitting there with my chin on the sill, I felt the weight of my future float down and settle on my shoulders like a leaf drifts off a dry, red tree in autumn. I felt it blanket me and grow exponentially heavier. I was suffocating very quickly. To make a long story short, I do not have what it takes to be an artist and lack the wealthy background to be an artist regardless of the former fact. I had planned to study art at university for almost a decade, and that plan crashed before I could understand that it was crumbling. It was the only plan I made, which led me directly to a nervous breakdown. I begged my mother to let me take a gap year (she refused). I switched my major three times before school started and ended up suffering through a semester of film, which taught me many lessons and the importance of being around your own people. Whatever “my own people” may be, they are undoubtedly not film students.

The decision to switch to an English major was made purely by the fact that I had recently become reinterested in reading, this time with a focus on Palestinian literature. It was easy to begin reading again when the stories I read were sincerely important to me. I discovered that I enjoyed and had some talent in writing in a required course. In another course, I discovered that I enjoyed editing even more. It was almost like déjà vu, the way my Cinderella foot fell perfectly into the glass slipper of editing like it belonged to me. I’m more than grateful to have this opportunity as an Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications. Reading has created the parts of me that I love most, and I’m honored to be a part of uplifting more stories that shape people into their own slippers.

Hedaya Hasan is a Palestinian writer and designer based in Chicago.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Astronauts by Amy Miller

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from Astronauts by Amy Miller (Beloit Poetry Journal 2022).

Basement

When my sister came back home, she brought Earth, Wind & Fire.
Brought polyester dresses, size 0. Brought pills in a circular pack,
suede wedge heels, leather choker, blue eye shadow. Left her
boyfriend in California. Left his white hands, her black eye. In our
basement, I crashed on her bed on my stomach, feet up and waving,
while we listened to Roberta Flack, Harold Melvin, lyrics on the liner
sleeves. She brought Janis Ian . . . murmured vague obscenities. She
weighed 90 pounds. Brought some kind of sickness that made food
sad. Found a new boyfriend in a tequila sunrise, brought him home
to our parents for dinner just once: quiet, polite, big fro, tight shirt.
We never saw him again. She brought bottles and bottles and bottles.
She stored darkness in the empties. At night they stood on her dresser,
singing old soul songs as the air moved over their mouths.

Amy Miller’s poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Narrative, RHINO, Terrain, Tupelo Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press. Recipient of a 2021 Oregon Literary Fellowship, she lives in Ashland, Oregon, where she works for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is the poetry editor of the NPR regional listeners’ guide Jefferson Journal.


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How to Start a Coven by Deirdre Danklin

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from How to Start a Coven by Deirdre Danklin (Variant Lit 2022).

content warning for sexual assault


Dream Sequence

In my dream life, I walk up a moss-covered spiral
staircase to the top of an opalescent tower. I'm a
princess in my dream life, there's a white owl with a flat 
face perched on my shoulder who coos cliches in my 
ear. Shoot for the moon, the owl says, even if you miss 
you'll land among the stars. In my real life, there are 
glow-in-the-dark stars attached to my ceiling fan and 
a spider stuck weaving a web between the glass of my 
bedroom window and its screen. I go to school, and I'm 
not a princess. I have a dog that my family found skinny, 
starving, tied to a tree. Nothing flies. In my dream life, I 
catch my teeth in a bloody pile in my hands, and that's 
how I know something is coming to invade my kingdom. 
I'm not a princess but a king. So, I wear a crown made 
of bloody teeth and ride a white owl to the battlefield. 
There, I fight the falling debris of exploded stars. I win. 
In my real life, I grow up. I wear a school uniform that 
makes me look like Lucy from Peanuts. I make a few 
good friends, but we grow apart. In my dream life, they 
call me the toothless king, a destroyer and creator. There 
is peace in the gardens of my kingdom, and pink roses 
with blue eyeballs at their centers unfold and make the 
world smell like freshly cracked pistachios. In my real 
life, I go to a small college in Pennsylvania and every 
single one of my new friends gets drunk and wakes 
up with a boy's fingers inside them, or a boy's body on 
top of them. Twice, I carry a smaller girl home while 
she cries. In my dream life, a gray mist creeps over my 
kingdom. I grow a mouth full of baby teeth that scream
when it rains. I banish slippery-smiled people from my 
kingdom, the ones who throw parties and tell me I'm 
pretty. I tell them to wrap their belongings onto their 
backs, tie them up with a linen sack, and leave, go, be 
gone. I sit alone in my opalescent tower and the gray 
mist shuts all of the flower eyes. In my real life, I get a 
grant from the French department to study abroad. I eat 
lavender-flavored gelato and watch jugglers on unicycles 
maneuver ancient alleyways. I'm old enough to drink in 
the south of France, so my new friends and I buy cheap 
wine that tastes like vinegar and dance sur le pont
d'Avignon. In my dream life, the mist trembles a little, 
and I can see flashes of color behind it. The remaining
inhabitants of my kingdom, the talking animals and 
plant poets, say there is a possibility that the gray days 
may be lifting. They talk about me, shut up in my tower, 
like an ancient evil. My white owl tries to preen me, but I 
don't have any feathers. In my real life, I go to
Myrtle Beach and I lose track of a friend at a party. In the 
morning, I get a call from the local jail. They lead her out 
in shackles and an orange jumpsuit. A boy ripped her 
clothes off on the beach and she ran away naked and the 
cops threw her in jail for being indecent. In my dream 
life, the lightning comes. It irradiates the mist and kills 
the green grass and turns the toads reciting Shakespeare 
to stone. The lightning strikes the tower over and over 
again, and all of my baby teeth scream. In my real life, 
I meet the man I'll marry at a party, I move to Berlin, 
I move back, I get married, I work long hard jobs that 
don't require me to use my brain. I get called sweetie and 
sunshine and bitch by various bosses and people who 
call the office on the phone. In my dream life, the earth 
is scorched, but all of my screaming baby teeth have 
fallen out. I add them to my crown, which drips with 
blood. There are words banging on the doors of my opal 
tower, begging admittance to my abandoned kingdom, 
so I let them in. Vowels who aren't afraid of me, but sing 
loud low tunes of mourning and love. Consonants that 
chuckle and skip all around me. I smile a gummy smile. 
In my real life, my husband and I move from the worst 
apartment in the world to a better apartment, and I get 
into grad school. My boss gives me a nice purse as a
parting gift. Our new apartment is overrun with mice, 
so we adopt a cat. In my dream life, the vowels and 
consonants weave themselves together in a pattern that 
becomes people. Characters, they tell me, and I will write 
about them. I feel a new set of teeth, big and strong, like 
a horse's teeth, grow in. I smile a fat white smile and 
order the revived toads to fetch me a pen. We float up 
to the top of my ancient tower until our heads brush up 
against the bioluminescent mushrooms that sprout from 
the roof, glowing pink and green and blue. I write my 
name on the toads' skin and they shiver with happiness. 
In my real life, my cat purrs, my husband makes me 
pancakes, and there is sunshine coming through our bay 
window in the mornings. In grad school, my professors 
tell me not to write about dreams.

Deirdre Danklin holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins University. Danklin’s novella, Catastrophe, won the 2021 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize and was published by Texas Review Press. Danklin’s nonfiction has been published in The Ploughshares Bog and CRAFT, among other places. Currently, Danklin is an adjunct professor of writing, and she writes editorial letters for Fractured Lit, The Masters Review, and Uncharted Mag. She won a 2022 independent artist grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and two cats.


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How to Start a Coven by Deirdre Danklin

This selection, chosen by guest editor Kenli Doss, is from How to Start a Coven by Deirdre Danklin (Variant Lit 2022).


Father Whatawaste

He was handsome like a 50s superman. Hair so black it was almost blue. Eyes the color of Listerine. Our mothers called him Father Whatawaste. This was before we knew about the things priests do to children. We still thought the collar meant close to God. God’s mouth on earth. We went on a trip to the woods. Father Whatawaste and Sister Theresa and thirteen girls from St. Lucy’s Preparatory School. In the woods, we were told, we’d feel closer to God.

On the bus ride to the woods, we were silent. Watching Father Whatawaste talk to Sister Theresa and envying her habit, her marriage to Jesus, that let her lean in, pretending she couldn’t hear the things he murmured to her. We watched her neck flush pink with blood. At night, in our tent, Annabell Hurley said she’d like to take off Father Whatawaste’s cloak and sink her teeth into him. She’d bite him all over until he was purple with her bites. We nodded, we agreed. We, hot-headed catholic school girls, conspired with Annabelle Hurley to consume him whole.

I got up, pretending I had to pee, but really looking for a spiritual experience in the dark. At that age, I thought God was just waiting for me to be alone before he’d show me a sign or grant me His favor. I walked to the edge of the lake, looking for a bolt of lightning or a burning bush. Instead, there was Father Whatawaste, his cloak hiked up to his hips, tentatively trying to walk on water. I believed that he could. He, so handsome, so authoritative. I would have believed he could fly. He stepped once, twice, into the cold water and sank. I watched from the shadows of the trees as he lifted his befuddled head to the sky, searching, like I was searching, for any sort of sign.

Back in the tent, Annabell Hurley was still talking about the things she’d do to Father Whatawaste. She’d tie him up in her father’s toolshed and feed him birdseed out of her hand. Yes, yes, the other girls nodded. She’d encase his feet in cement and bury them in her grandmother’s garden and train peas to vine up his legs. Of course, of course, the other girls said. Listening to them plan their pagan rites, I heard the clarion bell of my vocation. I thought: he is looking for favor in the wrong place. We girls are the priestesses with violent visions. He, his feet wet with failure, should come home to us.

“I know where he is,” I said.

The girls’ eyes shone in the dark.

So, when Sister Theresa found him the next morning, strapped to a tree with ropes taken from our tents, his naked body bedecked with flowers, a bird’s nest resting like a crown on his head, blood running like vines down his legs, her first thought was that it was a beautiful tableau. The center of an Italian triptych. Out of habit, she sank to her knees.

The thirteen girls from St. Lucy’s were nowhere to be found, even though our parents searched for us, we’d heard a higher call. We wait, teeth sharp, for the next group of children led by a beautiful man to the forest, looking for a sign, trying to get closer to God.

Deirdre Danklin holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins University. Danklin’s novella, Catastrophe, won the 2021 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize and was published by Texas Review Press. Danklin’s nonfiction has been published in The Ploughshares Bog and CRAFT, among other places. Currently, Danklin is an adjunct professor of writing, and she writes editorial letters for Fractured Lit, The Masters Review, and Uncharted Mag. She won a 2022 independent artist grant from the Maryland State Arts Council. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and two cats.


Kenli Doss holds a BA in English and a BA in Theatre-Performance from Jacksonville State University. She is a freelance writer and actress based out of Alabama, and she spends her free time painting scenes from nature or writing poetry for her mom. Ken’s works appear in Something Else (a JSU literary arts journal), Bonemilk II by Gutslut Press, Snowflake Magazine, The Shakespeare Project’s Romeo and Juliet Study Guide and A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide, and The White Cresset Arts Journal.