The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: earthwork by Jill Khoury

This selection, chosen by guest editor JJ Rowan, is from earthwork by Jill Khoury (Switchback Books 2024).

so tired i close my eyes briefly

turn away from my mother
for the bigger brighter moon

                                night
                                                                this pang
                                                                                                cambered

road      banked
                                                                no shoulder
                                                                high                       dizzy

inked sky thickbrandied

cinders
slide away

under my steps

i turn away from my mother for

                                                                                                hunter’s
                                moon                    buck moon        full
cold                       moon

in silence i turn back
to follow mama corona

she is gone

Jill Khoury (she/her) is a disabled poet and a Western Pennsylvania Writing Project fellow. She has taught poetry in high school, university, and enrichment settings. She holds an MFA from The Ohio State University and edits Rogue Agent, a journal of embodied poetry and art. Her poems have appeared in numerous venues, including Copper Nickel, VerseDaily, CALYX, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day. Winner of the Gatewood Prize, her second full-length collection earthwork is available from Switchback Books. Connect with her at jillkhoury.com.

JJ Rowan is a queer nonbinary poet and dancer whose writing and movement practices have developed largely out of collaborative approaches and the pursuit of deep connection. They are looking for the places where the written line and the lines of the moving body intersect, where genre blurs and remixes and reboots, and where style and role reach maximum fluidity and deeper capacity. Their chapbook, a simple verb, is available from Bloof Books. You can follow their handwriting and movement projects on Instagram.