The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Noctuary by C. Rees

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Noctuary by C. Rees (Host Publications 2026).

Beside the black poplars

my father ran against his own spectre’d brain   his sadness   his cramped hunger cabinet
kicked the water-logged soccer ball through the acre and back

                        the dead translate our bodies as reeds voice a marsh
          find their way back like fugitive monks from a night we’ve never seen
                        tucked beneath their robes the books they bear are their bodies

          their fingers are long shadows                         their cheeks scuffed as sitting-stones
                        their shoulders torqued like St. Sturgeon suspended from his tree
                                                                            and feet        grandmother’s
                                                                            and feet        worm-worn spars of wood
                                                                            and feet        father’s feet his mother’s tributary
                                                                            the perennial bones
                                                                            unfurl grass through the grass

C. Rees (they/them) is a queer poet and bookseller whose work contends with contamination and complicity, emergent ecologies, hauntings, and porousness. Their first poetry collection, NOCTUARY, will be published by Host Publications in 2026. C. was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lenni-Lenape land, and currently lives in Austin, TX, on Comanche, Lipan Apache, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos land. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the New Writers Project at UT Austin. They are ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.

Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.