The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Head to Toe of It by Rikki Santer

This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Genevieve Pfeiffer, is from Head to Toe of It by Rikki Santer, released by Kelsay Books in 2021.

Sweatpants Theology

Lost reasons to dress up.
Quarantine a voodoo temple.
Crows fly over cities, towns, centuries.
Silhouettes loom across the chessboard
and words can’t seem to go any further.
Mystery plays perform in cardboard theaters
this time with masks and hospital ships.
Homebody sweatpants have a mind
of their own—one leg then the other, slogan
t-shirts with sweat stains, new state
of merch. Stumble through reverberating chatter,
surplus of molecular metaphor in virus,
publicized publicized connotation.
Pivot on how little can be enough
to take the long view.

Rikki Santer’s poetry has received many honors including six Pushcart and three Ohioana and Ohio Poet book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her eleventh poetry collection, Stopover, which is in conversation with the original Twilight Zone series, was recently published by Luchador Press. She is also a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council, a vice president of the Ohio Poetry Association, and a member of the poetry troupe Concrete Wink.

Genevieve Pfeiffer is a poet, writer, and scholar. Their masters project at New York University explores ideological shifts around birth control & abortion and their intersections with nature & culture. Read more about this project at the link below.