Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: As I copyedited this poem by Jenny Molberg, I appreciated finding out about the giant Pacific chiton and its vulva-looking foot (I hadn’t even known mollusks had a foot). It seems like an unusual figure to bring into a poem starting with a honeymoon, but the conversation between the couple about how to care for the beached creature and their choices shaping the marriage make the mollusk just right for the scene. I love this kind of love poem, with a complex emotional sentiment.

Listen to Molberg read the poem:

The Red Negligee

When the honeymoon was over,
a woman called us from the hotel
to say that she found, tangled
in the white sheets, my red negligee.
Then we got a text from the oyster
bar, who discovered my sunglasses 
tucked in a window-side cushion. 
We are nearly forty, still tearing it up.
On the beach we’d found a giant 
Pacific chiton, prehistoric in orange 
armor, vulvar foot still pulsing 
between its gills. We hunched over it
like children, rocking its chunky cradle,
arguing whether or not to throw
it back to sea. We have agreed
never to be parents. I wanted 
to cast it out, cast it back, but you 
with your feathery heart
would not intrude on death. I would 
take off everything, even childhood, 
to keep my promise to you.

Jenny Molberg’s third poetry collection, The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. A National Endowment for the Arts fellow, she is Professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College, where she serves as editor-in-chief for Ploughshares.