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.

Tarot Deck for Ravaged Memories

Your card is the Empress—she holds a knife for a scepter. She has skin under her nails and claw marks on her belly. There are no men in this deck, but every card throws a shadow on the table in the shape of something a man did to you once. When you overturn The Lovers card, crows peck at the bones of carrion. The Sun is the moon and The Moon is a heart hovering in space. The Hanged Woman bears an image of you as a child, but you know this card means something about your father. The Joker glows as a shifting constellation of dying stars; the first pattern you can trace says something about your future.

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.