The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Beautiful Outlaw by Jennifer Perrine

This feature, chosen by Guest Editor dez brown, is from Beautiful Outlaw by Jennifer Perrine (Kelsey Street Press 2025).

SPELL TO LEAVE BEHIND A LIFE

Nothing was basic in that place, the fence
triple concertina, the dirt I carved
into trenches, burrowed with my bare arms,
each mark I made a stay against the fire,
bombardment in the dark.
                                                  What I return
to is home. What I call Spartan is so
because I had to prepare, make ready
for war, fitted with nothing but a bed,
a sheath for my sword.
                                           What I once called peace
dissolved easy, fat on my tongue, dusted
fine powder over the sleep where my teeth
would bury themselves in each other. Home
became a story best told at dusk, thread
sharpened with spit, needle meant to suture
but first to pierce.
                                  I left as carrion
leaves the animal who once believed flesh
necessary for life. I sliced my pelt,
slit it wide enough for home to slip through
that opening made by my hand, my knife.

Jennifer (JP) Perrine’s (any/all) most recent book, Beautiful Outlaw, was the recipient of the QTBIPOC Book Prize and the Stafford/Hall Prize for Poetry. Perrine is the author of four previous books of poetry: Again, The Body Is No Machine, In the Human Zoo, and No Confession, No Mass. Their other recent work appears in the anthologies Best Small Fictions, Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times, and A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid Lit Collection. A two-time winner of Arts and Culture Diversity and Inclusion Awards from the Asian American Journalists Association, JP lives in Portland, where they cohost the Incite: Queer Writers Read series, guide nature and forest therapy retreats, and manage an equity and environmental justice program for the state of Oregon.

dr. dez brown (they/he), publishing as dezireé a. brown, is a Black queer nonbinary and transmasculine Pushcart Prize–nominated poet and interdisciplinary scholar, born and raised in Flint, MI. Their debut collection of poetry, they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming, was the winner of the Joe W. Bratcher Prize and a finalist for the 2026 Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. Often claiming to have been born with a poem written across his chest, he spends much of his time gaming and plays a mean hand of spades. Follow them online at @deziree.the.writer.