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

The bodies of women
try and try and try. Unlike the still life

I do not name all that is.
I just try. I cannot turn from the thought

or help but rehearse the shades
pulling themselves over us—copper gloss,

iridescent bronze, brandied raisin,
singed persimmon, amber-auburn, snakescaled apricot, ombre grey-gold

canary stormdust—each pronounces, lets
as easily as a spaghetti strap

from a hanger lacking teeth.
It haunts me, understand—

velvet’s articulate where I am not.
Over & over my arm seeks the inside

of a slow honey sleeve heavy enough to confirm me.
Golden hour, red sunset,

saffron cigar, faded sable, cracked topaz,
mustard rust—every bolt I conjure

backed with silk that is wet, that is dark, that is
stained or snagged, its ribbon-edge

singed. If she weren’t spilled gold what
would we see. If she weren’t

burned or strewn or gilt. If she weren’t

closed to us as though
reachable only as the story.

Ready to sleep.
I fell for women because I could read.

Because women were sleeping
and I wasn’t, because women were speaking

and I wasn’t, because stories
were telling to me. I fell for what they gathered

and kept gathering. I believed.

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.