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

Velvet was someone saying yes,
the room beyond this door, the space

between your ribs, where
between rib and rib darkness holds itself

compact as a line pressed from
the white. Velvet was the heaving, always

closing what could not stay open:
we were supposed to die out. / You had your face

pressed up against the coarse dyed velvet /
Of the curtain, always looking out for your own

transmigration: / What colors you would
wear, what cut of jewel posed the one whose lines

my hands horizoned.
So many kinds of pages.

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.