Merridawn Duckler

On Being Well Dressed

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2025: VOL. 40.

When there’s nowhere else to turn I open the closet. I face my suits, my length and shortness each an adjustment in proportion, flamboyance, reserve. Separates pile up all around me, what people see is the product of my previous doing and current undoing. I own the power to discard, though naked truth is not an option. My history is in there and a history of men and women dressing before me. I consider every tag. The hieroglyphic of wash options are runes. I’ll dissect a label like a novel. My clothes are my declaration to the public, my TED talk. In dressing rooms I’m a clown car, emitting a shocking number of many selves. Material is my material.  Rubbing against the weave is my alchemy. I’ll look at myself from the front and the side, my own Picasso. Sometimes weather’s involved, shoe tongues whisper my plans to win over all elements. Everything in the environment leans in to adorn me. Clothing is what the snake and I discussed. Snake said cover up your knowledge and you’ll be like me, able to shed the self from disposable feet to the diamond of your head. Who wouldn’t listen to such an enthralling misdirection! At the start of every invented world lies the mirror. 

Merridawn Duckler is a writer from Oregon and author of poetry books INTERSTATE (dancing girl press), IDIOM (Harbor Review), and MISSPENT YOUTH (rinky dink press) as well as a collection of flash fictions titled ARRANGEMENT (Southernmost Books.) Her non-fiction has appeared recently in The Ekphrastic Review, At Length, Ruminate, Pembroke, Buckman Journal, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She won the Invisibly City flash CNF contest judged by Heather Christle.