This week, Managing Editor Krista Cox shares her 5 favorite books featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed in 2023, and shares a new selection from each.
Krista's next selection is Heirloom by Ashia Ajani, released by Write Bloody Publishing in 2023, selected by guest editor Sarah Clark.
Devil’s Punchbowl (Natchez, MS)
in the span of one year following the Civil War, over 20,000 Black people
were starved and left for dead in the concentration camp called the Devil’s
Punchbowl. wild peach trees sprung up from the resulting mass grave.
the
ruby-throated
hummingbird is the most
common hummingbird that roosts
in the Great River state. at the dawn of wild
peach season, their scarlet breasts swell with carnal lust.
on rare occasion, hummingbirds will craft their nests & lay
their eggs on a peach. sheltered under green laced shade,
camouflage threaded from plant down & spider silk hangs heavy
with life’s viscous nectar. Genesis dictates God responsible for
this ambrosia, a stone fruit salvation sent from heaven.
existence is by its nature precarious: we all dissolve into precarity,
occupying our minds with whatever sweet, honeyed thing offers
its body as a refuge. slice through fuzzy, vulnerable flesh to
exhume a hardened heart-stone from tender pulp here.
fruit falls untouched. the blossoms of deep spring
been trickled down to soil’s dark grave ad
infinitum anticipating harvest. that
summer, antebellum spirits
will crush tiny bones
underfoot. trees
weep nectar
again.
Ashia Ajani is a sunshower hailing from Denver, CO, (unceded Cheyenne, Ute, and Arapahoe land), now living in Oakland (unceded Ohlone land). A lecturer in the AfAm Department at UC Berkeley and a climate justice educator with Mycelium Youth Network, Ajani has received fellowships from Just Buffalo Literary Center, Tin House, The Watering Hole and others. Their words have appeared in Sierra, Atmos, World Literature Today, Frontier Poetry, & elsewhere. Ajani is co-poetry editor of the Hopper Literary Magazine and a Fall 2023 Poet in Residence at SF MoAD. Their debut poetry collection, Heirloom (Write Bloody Publishing), dropped April 2023.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2024) and the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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