I am ordering clothes because the senator was wrestled to the ground and handcuffed. I ordered a black blazer because I am in mourning for the those shot in Minnesota. I also ordered a white shirt, so I am going on in spite of mourning. I will look official, like a police car, dressing up to keep my backbone straight. The army has to stand straight to follow orders and to show they’re not afraid. A priest wears black for humility, white a sign of how God scrubs everything pure, you could say. I might look like an army lining up these words. Each word has its own squiggle, to show it’s different from the others, but united. They march, too, they hold their signs. My blazer is stylishly wrinkled to show I’m not really an army. I am squiggling between the soldiers. You might not notice me, but the soldiers will feel me brushing their legs. They’ll remember the soft furriness of being human.
The Blazer
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Copyright © 2026 by Fleda Brown.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Fleda Brown’s most recent book is The End-of-the-Line Club: a Diary, from Mission Point Press. Her eleventh full-length collection of poems, The End of the Clockwork Universe, was released in 2025 from Carnegie-Mellon University Press. Doctor of the World won the Finishing Line Press Chapbook Contest for 2024, The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems is available from University of Nebraska Press. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her recent memoir is Mortality, with Friends (Wayne State University Press, an MIPA Winner and Midwest Book Award winner in memoir). She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07.
Plume is a magazine dedicated to publishing the very best of contemporary poetry. To that end, we will be highly selective, offering twelve poems per monthly issue. A provisional indication of our tastes — “what we are looking for” — may be inferred from the quoted passages (which will change often): a sense of the uncanny, foremost, and of the fineness of language, the huge absences to which it points and partakes of, and the urgency and permanence of its state of departure — the coattails forever — just now — disappearing around the corner…
The title of our review suggests several elements that in one way or another find kinship in our little adventure: Aside from the fact of its French definition — and not forgetting l’homme de plume — these include:
— in English, the feather with which one adorns oneself or bestows on another, whose topmost barbicels when trailed across a bare forearm or unguarded nape make its owner’s skin crawl and leap with delight;
— the name of Henri Michaux’s ephemeral and paradoxical prose poem figure;
— and the glancing blow of surrealism in Breton’s famous reaction upon finding himself in the presence of beauty: “a plume of wind at the temples.”
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