The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Smaller Ghosts by Jennifer Moore


This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Smaller Ghosts by Jennifer Moore, a book of centos released by Seven Kitchens Press in 2020. 

A little satin-like she entered the evening,
life still there, upon her hair—
the musk of chestnuts in a house
the wind owns.

Where the Alone lived,
my ghost looked up and saw
a feather blown
between everyone’s bones.

I do not know what becomes
of winter, gone as the moment
begins to wink. The soul sleepwalks
into a mirror—

one stepped in as one stepped out.
Inside I am frosted; if I weep
it’s for the rocking chair.
Nothing left except light on your fur.


Source texts (for all book poems): Claribel Alegría, “Rain,” Rae Armantrout, “Unbidden,” David Barber, “To the Trespasser,” Emily Berry, “This spirit she,” John Berryman, “Not to Live,” Frank Bidart, “The Ghost,” Linda Bierds, “The Ghost Trio,” Lucie Brock-Broido, “How Can It Be I Am No Longer I,” Emily Dickinson, [“One need not be a chamber”], [“The Zeroes—taught us—Phosphorus”], John Donne, “The Apparition,” Timothy Donnelly, “Globus Hystericus,” Carolyn Forché, “The Ghost of Heaven,” “Sequestered Writing,” Lola Haskins, “Patsy Sees a Ghost,” Mary Hickman, “Visionary Elegies,” Cynthia Huntington, “Ghost,” Mark Irwin, “Ghost,” Christopher Kennedy, “Ghost in the Land of Skeletons,” Dan Lechay, “Ghost Villanelle,” Dana Levin, “Ghosts That Need Reminding,” Vachel Lindsay, “The Spider and the Ghost of a Fly,” Robert Lowell, “The Ghost,” Nathaniel Mackey, “Ghost of a Trance,” Carl Marcum, “Cue Lazarus,” Paul Mariani, “Ghost,” Sarah Messer, “Prayer from a Mouse,” Eric Pankey, “Epitaph,” “Restless Ghost,” Elise Paschen, “Ghost, Fountain,” Carl Phillips, “Ghost Choir,” Edgar Allan Poe, “Lenore,” Lisa Sewell, “Letter from a Haunted Room,” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Wallace Stevens, “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” Keith Waldrop, “The Ghost of a Hunter,” Afaa Michael Weaver, “The Appaloosa,” Dara Wier, “Blue Oxen.”


Jennifer Moore was born and raised in Seattle. She is the author of Easy Does It (2021) and The Veronica Maneuver (2015), both from the University of Akron Press, and a chapbook of centos, Smaller Ghosts (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Bennington Review, Interim, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. An associate professor of creative writing, she currently serves as Director of the School for the Humanities and Global Cultures at Ohio Northern University and lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.

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