Jess Liu's poem "diorama" has been paired with a dress from Daniel Roseberry's Spring/Summer 2026 Schiaparelli collection titled "The Agony and the Ecstasy" - inspired by the designer's own encounter with Michalengelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling. This look includes a sheer top embroidered with white hand-cut lace flowers in bas-relief effect and a voluminous cage-like skirt of mesmerizing black-to-white gradient tulle. Liu's long poem confronts the "spurious" nature of reality by linking sight ("blot that mimics / its own flourishing") and sound ("in white flowers / phonic fabric stitched"), suggesting language might be something closer to a form of taxidermy ("as a careful structure of bones / in the ice case"). Liu's "diorama" also involves a repeating image of a shrike - laughing, undressing, folding - all while white flowers appear to conceal something more insidious.
— Paul Cunningham, Editor
diorama
spurious
night flashes
underbelly
on premeditated
liquid prism
of sight o shrike
undressing our dark
instruments
a seeing
accretion
blot that mimics
its own flourishing
mimes dark edges
fluoresces or bends
phonic mattering to
trumpets of flowers
heraldic slaughter douses its head
in white flowers
phonic fabric stitched
up fine chalky powder
melting in the brain
as a careful structure of bones
in the ice case
that holds itself accountable
for the ethics of seeing
weather or its own transparent
insider knowledge
o scent from afar off time
you strike your face with a war cry
powder your nose
thread your ears with a seamy idea
as a cut sutures real parts
gender foaming itself
on my dull blade
as our membrane stretches
to touch itself
o laughter you
shrike in the dark
o engraved shape
ideating grass fragilely
before it plots its next ruse
shaves our florid trails
with a blade that tucks its hilt
into its own inversions
choreography of leaves
cleaving me
fiber bends its back
a wire can touch its head
lights itself up in
frenetic cuts
like a cut blooms
the syntax of things
a nub of blood on our gem casings
a spur of quartz
that grits its teeth
graves bombed
to the nub keep
blooming red
shocks our ears
light or convulsion
the white prism of things
laying down lines
to track our own futurity
bordering insane
vanity our cage
locked in this divine spiral
one divine finger
twisting your locks
into diversionary petals
that break themselves into powder
on their ‘state’
your mess is a frame that impinges
my aversion to employment
my funds gathering water to their breasts
with the swollen idea of things
a white lockbox
a phosphoric cage
your projected geometries
bloom their graves
every day this land spikes
the phosphorus of things white teeth
shrikes seed our tarped sky
a raft of clouds flees time
presses ribbons into tracings in ice
voice sieved from a locked rhyme
brims at the lip of a cratered
misdemeanor accident
untraced scene no one
diagrams
o haughty diorama
stands on its own eats its blueprints
everything emits the baby teeth of things
reason is a shrike folding
its neck on the ground
a murmur is a concession
to lose the property
of a speechy thing
Jess Liu is a queer poet interested in detritus, latency, and apostrophe. Their work is published in Protean and Antiphony. They are this year's incoming MFA Fellow at UMass Amherst.
