The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Lararium by Ray Ball

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Elizabeth Vignali, is from Lararium by Ray Ball, released by Variant Lit in 2020.

Dendroctonus rufipennis

At a party, a friend of a friend asks
do you have children?
And you respond
There are thirty times
more dead spruce
than five years ago.
They turned red
and then a discomfiting dun
after climate change
birthed a destiny of beetles—
manifest. Smaller trees can
flourish in a forest
of ghosts, but that
doesn’t always mean
that they do.

Ray Ball currently lives on the land of the Dena’ina, where she works as a history professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is the author of two history books and two chapbooks of poetry, Tithe of Salt (Louisiana Literature, 2019) and Lararium (Variant Lit, 2020). Her poems and fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including Glass, Orange Blossom Review, Split Rock Review, and X-R-A-Y. She has received multiple nominations for Pushcart and been a Best of the Net finalist. Ray is senior editor at Coffin Bell and assistant editor Juke Joint. You can find her on Twitter: @ProfessorBall.

Elizabeth Vignali is the author of the poetry collection House of the Silverfish (Unsolicited Press 2021) and three chapbooks, the most recent of which is Endangered [Animal] (Floating Bridge Press 2019). Her work has appeared in Willow Springs, Poetry Northwest, Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Tinderbox, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest on the land of the Noxwsʼáʔaq and Xwlemi peoples, where she works as an optician, produces the Bellingham Kitchen Session reading series, and serves as poetry editor of Sweet Tree Review.