The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: The Velvet Book by Rae Gouirand

This selection, chosen by guest editor Shira Haus, is from The Velvet Book by Rae Gouirand (Cornerstone Press, 2024).

The Velvet Book

Seering flare for deeper pitch,
flashbulb for sudden ink, stress for disintegration

for the glint that erupts—
dazzle to curse to rupture to rush

changing pulse, simultaneous,
each new to the other. Each a change.

If I vowed I would speak
all words at once. All the speakable words

after a silence as long as all
the unspeakable words lined up one by one like

a line. Words are all words
at once. Silences one word at a time.

At a time is the life of velvet.
I am relentless remembering it,

scribbled across my own pile.
Face or stain I cannot choose. Each learns,

each leans. I am my own body
inside this, finishing. I make myself available

as a hunger would for naming.
Velvet for the structure not the fiber.

The reach of the surface toward
every mote floating. Is it any matter

we say fabric of the time as it blinks,
shakes, shimmers, climbs behind the drapes.

See it there climbing.
Most of the time since its invention

we’ve preferred something else
yet the pull asserts, late August on a plane

a heavy white spine glossed against
the thigh, the start of a dream about cold, about

color, about puncture, about capture
by one unable to look away from the deep

and deepening folds of the coat
saturated ahead of us. Velvet how deep

we soak, how hard we press
the pen, how thoroughly we test

the argument. The whole of it.

Rae Gouirand is also the author of two collections of poetry, Glass is Glass Water is Water (2018) and Open Winter (winner of the Bellday Prize, 2011), the chapbooks Rough Sequence (winner of the Keystone Chapbook Award, 2023), Little Hour (winner of the Swan Scythe Chapbook Contest, 2022), Jinx (winner of the Summer Kitchen Competition, 2019), and Must Apple (winner of the Oro Fino Competition, 2018), and a short work of nonfiction, The History of Art (winner of The Atlas Review’s Open Reading Competition, 2019). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Bateau, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, Foglifter, The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Kenyon Review, the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight, Michigan Quarterly Review, [PANK], Quarterly West, The Rumpus, Spinning Jenny, Under a Warm Green Linden, VOLT, ZYZZYVA, two volumes of the Best New Poets series, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies nationwide. She leads several longrunning independent workshops in northern California and online, including the cross-genre workshop Scribe Lab, and lectures in the Department of English at the University of California-Davis.

Shira Leah Haus (she/her) is a queer, antizionist Jewish writer from Michigan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, and wildness, among others. She has received support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and placed third in the 2024 Pinch Literary Awards for poetry.