The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: We Ran Rapturous by Shannon Sankey

HAIR

A tree will catch a snapped twig in the
fork of a healthy branch, god forbid it
reach the earth. The twig will balance
there for seasons. It is the same with
me, in the shower, with—what unit? a
handful?—a violence of curls, several
ounces of dull hair in my fists (horror
of lifting one’s own limb, horror of
autonomous weight). I do a terrible
math: what fraction of the whole? A
strand on the tweed coat of a lover
is romantic. I am not talking about
that, nor the common imposition
of a choked drain. I am telling you
about the tree that collects its ejected
parts, the tree that postures for
passersby a crooked kind of flowering.

This selection comes from the book, We Ran Rapturous, available from The Atlas Review.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Natalie Giarratano.

Shannon Sankey is the author of We Ran Rapturous (The Atlas Review, forthcoming 2019). Her poems have appeared at Poets.org, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, the minnesota review, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2017 Academy of American Poets Prize and a 2019 SAFTA residency. She holds an MFA from Chatham University, where she was the Whitford Fellow. She is the founder of Stranded Oak Press. www.shannonsankey.com / @shansankey

Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway PoetryTupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her partner and daughter and is the city’s poet laureate. Twitter handle is @shansankey

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: We Ran Rapturous by Shannon Sankey

BOWEL REST

At once I am slack-jawed and suckling,
soft-toothed and dumb-tongued, gnawing at nothing.

I draw liquid protein through a plastic straw,
sick of my own sounds in a house with no days.

My mother ransacks the kitchen of still-good boxes and bags,
stacks cans on the countertops, steals away every stale thing,

and I open the refrigerator door just to stand
in the bleached-blue, brilliant, annihilating light.

This selection comes from the book, We Ran Rapturous, available from The Atlas Review.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Natalie Giarratano.

Shannon Sankey is the author of We Ran Rapturous (The Atlas Review, forthcoming 2019). Her poems have appeared at Poets.org, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, the minnesota review, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2017 Academy of American Poets Prize and a 2019 SAFTA residency. She holds an MFA from Chatham University, where she was the Whitford Fellow. She is the founder of Stranded Oak Press. www.shannonsankey.com / @shansankey

Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway PoetryTupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her partner and daughter and is the city’s poet laureate. Twitter handle is @shansankey

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: We Ran Rapturous by Shannon Sankey

ORB WEAVER

I watch her tear down
her iridescent architecture
when she goes
hungry in the dark.
She gathers back
her own bright protein
with almost arms
into her self, into
her somewhere mouth.
And it looks to be
and it has to be enough.

This selection comes from the book, We Ran Rapturous, available from The Atlas Review.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Natalie Giarratano.

Shannon Sankey is the author of We Ran Rapturous (The Atlas Review, forthcoming 2019). Her poems have appeared at Poets.org, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, the minnesota review, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2017 Academy of American Poets Prize and a 2019 SAFTA residency. She holds an MFA from Chatham University, where she was the Whitford Fellow. She is the founder of Stranded Oak Press. www.shannonsankey.com / @shansankey

Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway PoetryTupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her partner and daughter and is the city’s poet laureate. Twitter handle is @shansankey

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: We Ran Rapturous by Shannon Sankey

CRICKET MAMA

warm yourself
on the front porch
post-shift

open your knees
and gather up
your house dress

air out the stick
and stink and
stuck of work

arch your back
point your wet
center at the sun

don’t care who
sees don’t sing
for nobody nobody

This selection comes from the book, We Ran Rapturous, available from The Atlas Review.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Natalie Giarratano.

Shannon Sankey is the author of We Ran Rapturous (The Atlas Review, forthcoming 2019). Her poems have appeared at Poets.org, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, the minnesota review, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2017 Academy of American Poets Prize and a 2019 SAFTA residency. She holds an MFA from Chatham University, where she was the Whitford Fellow. She is the founder of Stranded Oak Press. www.shannonsankey.com / @shansankey

Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway PoetryTupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her partner and daughter and is the city’s poet laureate. Twitter handle is @shansankey

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: We Ran Rapturous by Shannon Sankey

BROWN HOUSE AUBADE

Here, my work was tenderness. The pulse of
dark beans to loam. Heavy carafe, heap and spit.
My work: a queue of cups on her windowsill.
If she wouldn’t drink, fine. I left them to cool.
Here was my mother dying, her bed a boat on
her breath. I thought I might reanimate her. I
knew vaguely of her vertebrae: a herniation:
fentanyl patches: a gun in a bag and a box of
bullets. It was beside the point. I believed the
brown house would kill her. She slept for days
without intermission, without memory of me.
Did I ever see her face that year? Not in the
stories I tell myself. In dreams, I go back inside,
but I cannot find her. Her door is locked. There
is only a girlchild whispering to the dog. She
pauses, sensing me, but she never turns to look.

This selection comes from the book, We Ran Rapturous, available from The Atlas Review.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Natalie Giarratano.

Shannon Sankey is the author of We Ran Rapturous (The Atlas Review, forthcoming 2019). Her poems have appeared at Poets.org, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, the minnesota review, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2017 Academy of American Poets Prize and a 2019 SAFTA residency. She holds an MFA from Chatham University, where she was the Whitford Fellow. She is the founder of Stranded Oak Press. www.shannonsankey.com / @shansankey

Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway PoetryTupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her partner and daughter and is the city’s poet laureate.

 
 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: It Was Over There By That Place by Diane Glancy


But could not of it. But of it could not.

I was given a journey that let shadows change the presence
of the crib. Of memory in the remembering of the memory
of the act of being.

The struggle of thought. The process of it there.

A variant.

Others of it did.

The history of it came at night. To hear what the thought
of it was. What it thought what it was. In the thought of
what it was was the thought of it.

So much for the concrete of it. To be there for the
understanding.

But this of it was.

Of the day I will not belong if not dreamed.

This selection comes from the chapbook, It Was Over There By That Place, available from The Atlas Review.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .

Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. Her latest books are Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education (creative nonfiction), University of Nebraska Press, 2014, and Report to the Department of the Interior (poetry), University of New Mexico Press. 2015. In 2016-17 Wipf & Stock has published several books including Mary Queen of Bees (novella), The Servitude of Love (short stories) and The Collector of Bodies, Concern for Syria and the Middle East (poems).

Sarah Clark is a disabled non-binary Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly (www.anmly.org), Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series (www.betteringamericanpoetry.com) and The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She curated Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio (http://anmly.org/ap25-glitterbrain/) and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms (http://anmly.org/ap-27-indigenous-futures/), edited Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, Desire & Interaction, and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, First Peoples, Plural. They were co-editor of Apogee Journal‘s #NoDAPL #Still Here folio, and co-edited Apogee Journal‘s series “WE OUTLAST EMPIRE,” of work against imperialism, and “Place[meant],” on place and meaning, and is a former Executive Board member at VIDA. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations. www.twitter.com/petitobjetb

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: It Was Over There By That Place by Diane Glancy


What can I say?

I don’t have native language. I don’t have documentation.
My great-grandfather is not on the Dawes Rolls. He
fled Indian Territory because he was in trouble. He spent
his life hiding in northern Arkansas. I have the same
tendencies.
What is there in history but a shape of being? A language
structure that is place with its multiple meanings of places
within place.
I translate without original language. I translate the traces
of the process of original thought. Something of what
other says.


This selection comes from the chapbook, It Was Over There By That Place, available from The Atlas Review.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .

Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. Her latest books are Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education (creative nonfiction), University of Nebraska Press, 2014, and Report to the Department of the Interior (poetry), University of New Mexico Press. 2015. in 2016-17 Wipf & Stock has published several books including Mary Queen of Bees (novella), The Servitude of Love (short stories) and The Collector of Bodies, Concern for Syria and the Middle East (poems).
 
Sarah Clark is a disabled non-binary Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly (www.anmly.org), Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series (www.betteringamericanpoetry.com) and The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She curated Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio (http://anmly.org/ap25-glitterbrain/) and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms (http://anmly.org/ap-27-indigenous-futures/), edited Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, “First Peoples, Plural.” They were co-editor of Apogee Journal‘s #NoDAPL #Still Here folio, and co-edited Apogee Journal‘s series “WE OUTLAST EMPIRE,” of work against imperialism, and “Place[meant]“, on place and meaning, and is a former Executive Board member at VIDA. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations. www.twitter.com/petitobjetb

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: It Was Over There By That Place by Diane Glancy

Gourd Dance

It is memory over there by that place. Memory that
remembers before remembering. The family of my father
dislodged. The memory of my mother’s parents displaced
over them as marbles moving on a board of Chinese
checkers.
Or wind moving in the shocks of corn. A gourd dance
found there. Before the farm. Or trails of dust behind stars
traveling. Variants of headlights on the old dirt road to
follow.

And the gauze curtains through which the form of
remembering came. Through which it must pass for the
memory of the remembering to come. A shifting to
another to say what was not said. Of them was running
more than going. A gourd dance. A blowgun on its mark.

This selection comes from the chapbook, It Was Over There By That Place, available from The Atlas Review.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .

Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. Her latest books are Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education (creative nonfiction), University of Nebraska Press, 2014, and Report to the Department of the Interior (poetry), University of New Mexico Press. 2015. in 2016-17 Wipf & Stock has published several books including Mary Queen of Bees (novella), The Servitude of Love (short stories) and The Collector of Bodies, Concern for Syria and the Middle East (poems).
 
Sarah Clark is a disabled non-binary Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly (www.anmly.org), Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series (www.betteringamericanpoetry.com) and The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She curated Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio (http://anmly.org/ap25-glitterbrain/) and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms (http://anmly.org/ap-27-indigenous-futures/), edited Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, “First Peoples, Plural.” They were co-editor of Apogee Journal‘s #NoDAPL #Still Here folio, and co-edited Apogee Journal‘s series “WE OUTLAST EMPIRE,” of work against imperialism, and “Place[meant]“, on place and meaning, and is a former Executive Board member at VIDA. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations. www.twitter.com/petitobjetb

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: It Was Over There By That Place by Diane Glancy

Was not anything made that was made — John 1:3

A cat on the edge of water. A group of fish called school.
What I was was broken from the disparate pieces fishing in
the river. The lake. The stream of being. My brother caught
a fish. It was early in the fish-catching program they
forwarded. What is there is not of it now. But a vehicle for
travel. Separated in parts as fish in the water. Most of them
gone or swimming as fish swim together and apart in the
river. The strike of old ways. Wave-lines on the flat rock by
the shore. The Lakota believe their language was created
when their people were—FaceBook Native Hope 3/31/17.
It was the same on the trail I was there after. I had to speak
from different places in different ways to find where it
scattered. Waiting from where I was. I could follow where
they knew I was. It’s still the light by my fingers moving.

This selection comes from the chapbook, It Was Over There By That Place, available from The Atlas Review.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .

Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. Her latest books are Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education (creative nonfiction), University of Nebraska Press, 2014, and Report to the Department of the Interior (poetry), University of New Mexico Press. 2015. in 2016-17 Wipf & Stock has published several books including Mary Queen of Bees (novella), The Servitude of Love (short stories) and The Collector of Bodies, Concern for Syria and the Middle East (poems).
 
Sarah Clark is a disabled non-binary Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly (www.anmly.org), Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series (www.betteringamericanpoetry.com) and The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She curated Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio (http://anmly.org/ap25-glitterbrain/) and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms (http://anmly.org/ap-27-indigenous-futures/), edited Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, “First Peoples, Plural.” They were co-editor of Apogee Journal‘s #NoDAPL #Still Here folio, and co-edited Apogee Journal‘s series “WE OUTLAST EMPIRE,” of work against imperialism, and “Place[meant]“, on place and meaning, and is a former Executive Board member at VIDA. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations. www.twitter.com/petitobjetb

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: It Was Over There By That Place by Diane Glancy

This is from where I was.

It is another way to write—capturing old thought that
roams of its own into a form not its own. I am driving
and there it comes—a passage of the old world reporting.
A visage of the word-thought order under the surface
of thinking. It bleeds through at times when I’m not
expecting it. I hear it in the substructure of thought. It

is primal in intent. I still have resentment toward grade-
school teachers who stripped the knottiness of thought

with their rules of grammar. I want to say, rudeness of
grammar. My rebellion is saying it as it was said. My
rebellion is this work.

This selection comes from the chapbook, It Was Over There By That Place, available from The Atlas Review.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark .

Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. Her latest books are Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education (creative nonfiction), University of Nebraska Press, 2014, and Report to the Department of the Interior (poetry), University of New Mexico Press. 2015. in 2016-17 Wipf & Stock has published several books including Mary Queen of Bees (novella), The Servitude of Love (short stories) and The Collector of Bodies, Concern for Syria and the Middle East (poems).
 
Sarah Clark is a disabled non-binary Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly (www.anmly.org), Co-Editor of the Bettering American Poetry series (www.betteringamericanpoetry.com) and The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She curated Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio (http://anmly.org/ap25-glitterbrain/) and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms (http://anmly.org/ap-27-indigenous-futures/), edited Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, “First Peoples, Plural.” They were co-editor of Apogee Journal‘s #NoDAPL #Still Here folio, and co-edited Apogee Journal‘s series “WE OUTLAST EMPIRE,” of work against imperialism, and “Place[meant]“, on place and meaning, and is a former Executive Board member at VIDA. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations. www.twitter.com/petitobjetb