Happy New Year! This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from A Registry of Survival by Ann Tweedy, released by Last Word Press in 2020.

Grocery List of Items Purchased with Food Stamps (ca. 1980)

Cabot Extra Sharp Cheddar  
Prince Spaghetti 
Ragu Sauce 
Steak-umm 
Bumblebee Tuna (four one-serving cans)  
Olive Oil 
Local Unpasteurized Whole Milk  
Tropicana Orange Juice 
Eggs 
Quaker Oatmeal

P.S.

My babysitter’s husband tells my mother it’s crazy to buy in such small quantities—it’s not cost-effective, for example, to buy one-serving cans of tuna. That’s all she can eat, she says. Later— in my teens and twenties—I start to feel the specific anger of others about welfare recipients’ buying brand name food and doing other wasteful things like subscribing to cable tv. The general anger has always been there, but now it feels more targeted and precise—the lists of things that are wrong with us. When I’m in college, Mitt Romney—running for governor in Massachusetts—proposes conditioning food subsidies on not purchasing cable. The belief that poor people don’t deserve autonomy: now a rallying call.

Ann Tweedy‘s first full-length book, The Body’s Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016.  It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award.  Ann also has published three chapbooks, Beleaguered Oases (2nd ed. Seven Kitchens 2020), White Out (Green Fuse Poetic Arts 2013), and A Registry of Survival (Last Word 2020).  Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many other places, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and three Best of the Net Awards.  A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. She currently teaches at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law.

Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words.  She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.

Happy New Year! This selection, chosen by guest editor Valyntina Grenier, is from A Registry of Survival by Ann Tweedy, released by Last Word Press in 2020.

Early March, 2015

I called my mother after that last snowstorm. Once I wrote about it, the worry grew. As did my mace-like wonder about what kind of person I was. When I finally got her, the accumulation still several feet deep, she was okay. She repeated that snow means that she’ll have somewhere to go. We talked about this and that. How my 5-year-old likes school. What my husband’s up to. But a few minutes later, her voice changed—the tone short and the words almost brittle. It was the afternoon. She was in the train station and had to resume calling shelters looking for a one-night spot. They’re busy, she said, so you have to call over and over until they answer.

Ann Tweedy‘s first full-length book, The Body’s Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016.  It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award.  Ann also has published three chapbooks, Beleaguered Oases (2nd ed. Seven Kitchens 2020), White Out (Green Fuse Poetic Arts 2013), and A Registry of Survival (Last Word 2020).  Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many other places, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and three Best of the Net Awards.  A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. She currently teaches at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law.

Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words.  She is the author of Honeymoon Shoes and the chapbooks, Fever Dream/ Take Heart and In Our Now. You’ll find her work in, Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, Lana Turner, The Journal, Querencia, and The Wardrobe. Find her at valyntinagrenier.com or Insta @valyntinagrenier.

This week, Managing Editor Krista Cox shares her 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2023, and shares a new selection from each.

Krista's final selection, chosen by guest editor Katie Manning, is from 
God Themselves by Jae Nichelle, released by Simon & Schuster in 2023.

content warning for racialized violence

Three Churches Burn in Louisiana

when two or more Black people gathering in the name of preservation agree, it’s a law. I pass two or more Black people on the street, we form a congregation 

built on head nods & anonymity. my congregation not the forgiving type. an attempt to burn two or more Black people gathering in the name of preservation 

warrants my congregation knocking on your door on a Sunday morning just to tell you your bloodline ain’t shit. now it’s a law. a church is where two or more Black 

people gather. a church unseen cannot be burned, it’s a law. my congregation resurrects churches & blackens your eye faster than you can look at us. look at us. 

my congregation don’t testify against other members of the congregation. that’s a law. an embrace between two or more Black people is silent worship of our Black 

& our bodies. two or more Black people agree to whoop the ass of the next person who tries us. I’m tired. I need two or more Black people to embrace me. 

we save each other in this congregation. we don’t wait for external justice. we don’t seek restoration. two or more Black people gathering in the name 

of preservation have died for just that. my congregation disguises a laying of hands as a handshake. they’re praying for me. me & the still warm ground.

Jae Nichelle is the author of the poetry chapbook The Porch (As Sanctuary) from YesYes Books; the inaugural poetry winner of the John Lewis Writing Award from the Georgia Writers Association; and her poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2020, The Washington Square Review, The Offing Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, and elsewhere. Her spoken word poems have been featured by Write About Now, Speak Up Poetry Series, and Button Poetry.

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.

This week, Managing Editor Krista Cox shares her 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2023, and shares a new selection from each.

Next, Krista selected Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas, released by Deep Vellum in 2022, which was chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel.

Patron Saints

The people were not cruel, but the town was. 
In its heart, it was. In its heart of mills and falls 
and wind, it flogged itself, its people, who loved 
God and prayed to So-and-So, patron saint of 
whatever. Everyone there waiting for something 
that would never return. Some had waited so long, 
they forgot what it was and decided to call it heaven— 
the thing they waited for, that is. The town 
was not heaven but was also—sometimes, 
when I think about it—not Earth. 
Some other, nowhere place. Alien in its grey 
and beige, its salted streets and stone walls. 
Some days I’d climb to the top of the road 
to the old farm where my father saw his collie’s 
ghost. And I’d stand there waiting to see Franz, 
thinking, It’s true we all come back, everything, 
everyone returns. And when I saw nothing 
but late winter’s gold lick the forsaken trees 
and some schoolmates tool by in an old Saturn 
ringed around the rims with snow, I knew
I’d been abandoned by something, that Saint 
So-and-So was sleeping, forever sleeping—leave 
her be—and whatever I was waiting for lived 
somewhere else and I was never coming back. 

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. 

This week, Managing Editor Krista Cox shares her 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2023, and shares a new selection from each.

Krista's next choice for the best of 2023 is One Way to Listen by Asa Drake, released by Gold Line Press in 2022, selected by guest editor Sarah Clark.

Disagreeable Aspects of Hyphenation

Driving through the South wearing my mother’s clothes vs. someone who visits like they don’t know how to approach a wasp nest. 

A co-worker explains there’s nothing special about the food I grew up with. I had invited her into my home. I had picked fruit from my own yard, food I’d grown because it was impossible to buy. She had packed a to-go plate for her husband. That’s when she told me, leaving, There’s nothing special about the food you grew up with. 

I forget to protect my teeth, and now I find craze lines in the enamel. 

The webinar trainer asks that I practice. What are you going to say? It is so easy to know how another will root out my provenance. Less to understand what I want from this conversation I don’t want. 

I don’t know. 

To protect my teeth, I put my tongue between the bite. I don’t think the dead are waiting for us to do anything in particular. It’s been 24 years and I still carry a nest of small animals. This year’s is the first that survives. Something I’ve touched that lives, so this is the least of my sins. 

Remember, America is only one possibility. 

Online, the silk advertises I can sleep anywhere and shows me bodies asleep in the desert. Here the snakes don’t bite. They wrap around me under a silk gown and keep their mouths closed. Keeping our mouths closed keeps us warm. We’re in this together. Dreaming a man—not the lover— gets too close, so close we all open our mouths. 

Who’s happier than Medusa? I think I hear my lover, but I’ve misheard him. He was cutting her up. Who’s halved more than Medusa?

I can’t say. There are a million things you can halve in the world. A million you can’t.  

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.

This week, Managing Editor Krista Cox shares her 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2023, and shares a new selection from each.

Krista's next selection is Heirloom by Ashia Ajani, released by Write Bloody Publishing in 2023, selected by guest editor Sarah Clark.

Devil’s Punchbowl (Natchez, MS)

in the span of one year following the Civil War, over 20,000 Black people
were starved and left for dead in the concentration camp called the Devil’s
Punchbowl. wild peach trees sprung up from the resulting mass grave.

the
ruby-throated
hummingbird is the most
common hummingbird that roosts
in the Great River state. at the dawn of wild
peach season, their scarlet breasts swell with carnal lust.
on rare occasion, hummingbirds will craft their nests & lay
their eggs on a peach. sheltered under green laced shade,

camouflage threaded from plant down & spider silk hangs heavy
with life’s viscous nectar. Genesis dictates God responsible for
this ambrosia, a stone fruit salvation sent from heaven.

existence is by its nature precarious: we all dissolve into precarity,
occupying our minds with whatever sweet, honeyed thing offers
its body as a refuge. slice through fuzzy, vulnerable flesh to
exhume a hardened heart-stone from tender pulp here.
fruit falls untouched. the blossoms of deep spring
been trickled down to soil’s dark grave ad
infinitum anticipating harvest. that
summer, antebellum spirits
will crush tiny bones
underfoot. trees
weep nectar
again.

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.

This week, Managing Editor Krista Cox shares her 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2023, and shares a new selection from each.

First up: space neon neon space by luna rey hall, released by Variant Lit in 2022, which was chosen by guest editor JJ Rowan.

common blue violet

grandma nothing left but lungs. 
damn, even those rancid & pocked 

with blue violets. like an old field,
she remnant. full of new growth. 

the bad kind. 

when i tell her of my growth, 
she say it the good kind. 

hold my hand, hers’ freckled 
& bloomed veins. hold my hand, 

the squeeze all the tightness 
& hope she can muster. 

luna rey hall is a queer trans writer. they are the author of four books including the upcoming novella-in-verse the patient routine (Brigids Gate Press, 2023). her poems have appeared in The Florida Review, The Rumpus, & Raleigh Review, among others.

JJ Rowan (they/them) is a queer nonbinary writer and dancer. Their poems, not-poems, and interactive performances have appeared in the tiny, Dream Pop Journal, 45th Parallel, and at the SMOL Fair and the Splinter Collective’s Interrupted by Trains, among others. Their most recent chapbook is a simple verb (Bloof Books). They are on the editorial team at just femme & dandy. You can sign up for their newsletter, actual motion, at their website.

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Cancer Voodoo by Melissa C. Johnson, released by Diode Editions in 2022.

content warning for cancer

Bindweed

Mama told me once that she never thought life
could be different, or maybe she said better,
than a series of brutal, arrogant men making
your choices, treating you like a servant—
angry fathers and husbands ruling like despots.
I think it was after my separation, when I asked
why she’d never left, why she’d put up with
him for so long. When I asked her what about books,
television, movies—all those glimmering mirages
upon which I’d built my own escape
from that stifling small town, she said
“Oh, that’s just playacting. That’s not real.”

The only kind man in her life the doctor
her mother had nearly escaped with,
the affair discovered only after her death,
Mama so disgusted and angry that I’d been a pawn
for those two elegant grandparents generously
treating their five-year-old grandchildren
to the Ice Capades. I wasn’t corrupted, only
remembered the lost balloon, the tears,
the replacement then tied to my wrist
for safekeeping. Mama’s rage seemed outsized, proof
of her uprightness, her strong moral code. She valued
the truth above all else, it seemed, but ambivalently

told me about the trial in which my dance teacher’s
husband was acquitted of raping the Black maid,
even though he’d surely done it. My grandfather served
on the jury, told the story with pride, how he
and the other men had protected one of their own.
Maybe this story was a warning.
I went to that house twice a week for lessons;
the youngest boy, much older than me, paid
me too much attention, kept trying to get me alone.
Maybe both stories were warnings.
Maybe Mama was just angry about the lies,
the vows and oaths dismissed,

or maybe she resented my grandmother
who always seemed to get her way,
who was never defeated, who outlived her husband
and could finally buy whatever she wanted,
who wrote Mama out of the will so Daddy
didn’t get the money, who didn’t stop her from smoking,
and kept her home to cook dinner, do the books at the shop
while her younger sister got a new VW and two years of college,
her older brother saw the world with Uncle Sam.
My mother got mono, got pregnant, got married,
got pregnant, got a shitty job, got up to a pack a day,
got cheated on, got beaten, got cancer that grew like bindweed.

Melissa C. Johnson is a Southern poet living in Central Pennsylvania where she serves as Associate Vice Provost and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at The Pennsylvania State University. Her first poetry chapbook, Looking Twice at the World, was published by Stepping Stones Press and the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. Diode Editions published her second chapbook, Cancer Voodoo, poems from which have been featured at American Life in Poetry and Verse Daily. Her poetry has also been published at NELLE, Waccamaw, Borderlands, The Cortland Review, The Northern Virginia Review, and elsewhere.