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.

Raze an Abandoned House

Empty fruits now. No one told the grass,
the weeds, the trees to leave. The sprinkler

is dry, directionless. How to make shapes
in the yard again, feet coming to home?

Chandeliers so bored with their glints;
unappreciated, they’re Vegas headdresses

now. They watch weddings on work
breaks, shaking their noisy bodies

to object. Still, they won’t be back by
the end of this spell. You’ll have light

but it won’t be in necklaces, broken
chains tinkling in the dark.

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.