This very cool excerpt from Sara Wainscott's manuscript Coolheaded has been paired with a multi-tiered tulle garment from Vivienne Westwood's 1994 "Café Society" show. Westwood recognized the café as "the hub of all the social and intellectual life," while also paying homage to the British founder of French haute couture himself: Charles Frederick Worth. Like the "punks with their 'hawks flopped pink and soft passing," Wainscott's poems swell into towers of "meringue" and "pink crepe paper" mutations, evoking the same elegant yet chaotic intensity of a classic, mind-boggling Westwood collection. "Something new will happen," promises Wainscott. "Culture lives through controversy," proclaimed Westwood. Two peas in a pod.
— Paul Cunningham, Editor
From Coolheaded
I will change one thing, swap places with a word or a person, and something new will happen. I will arrive somewhere beyond beginning, I will open my eyes and be alive, adjacent to my life, the sky lathering, relapsing, pink crepe paper slipped into a pocket. I will arrive and I will make decisions, pink paper, bone shards, the advice of my dead, the oceans and lakes and swimming pools of sky. Meringue towering, leaning, the suspense of not falling, of instability, of being sweet and soft.
Circle of sky crossed by branches, circle of branches around a trunk, branches tipped with circles of tulle, creamy circles trembling and thrashing and growing still, so still they might have never known touch, shoulders in a clean cotton undershirt, wearing a tie like a leash.
//
Begin the vertical drop the zipper splits and here come yellowjackets, aardvarks, bummers and bumpers and bullheads, sweet william swollen pompous increasing in size and intensity. I trip the safety valve I try to pet the needlefish I chase a funnel cloud I hire a private investigator I sample the prosciutto I build a ski jump a long beige track moving aside the mountain stretched long and long and long and long and full of those rivets with octagonal heads hammered out pennies banged glistening spent on some wastoid talking about a quaalude split three ways lying with the sunbeams in my eyes the stabbing the stabbing I knock off the dust spread the eagle enter the city limits buy a guy a beer unless it’s Sunday sit on the stoop with the punks their ‘hawks flopped pink and soft passing a tiny yellow golf pencil back and forth across the crossword puzzle.
//
Sara Wainscott is the author of Insecurity System (Persea, 2020) and The Star Cabins (Rescue Press, 2026). She lives in Chicago.
