The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Book of Levitations by Jenny Sadre-Orafai & Anne Champion

This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Book of Levitations by Jenny Sadre-Orafai & Anne Champion, released by Trembling Pillow Press in 2020.

Spell for Daughters with Nightmares

You are your fathers—dreams happen to you.
Your mothers are first to feel the ruptured

breathing. They swaddle raw amethyst
(spangled mountain), put you and your sleep

on top. Fathers, footnotes, would cancel it.
Don’t let them handle that. This is the best

you can want, daughters. You’ll keep your voice
strong and young for when you need it awake.

Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of Paper Cotton Leather and Malak and the co-author of Book of Levitations. Her fourth poetry collection, Dear Outsiders, is forthcoming from University of Akron Press. Her prose has appeared in The Rumpus, Fourteen Hills, The Los Angeles Review, and others. She is co-founding editor of Josephine Quarterly and a professor at Kennesaw State University.

Anne Champion is the author of She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient.