Ah, I see now. You are leveraging https://github.com/rackerlabs/quark/blob/fcdbf4a34b61a38e8ff3cde7451fb9247fb06ea1/quark/db/api.py#L144 to insert the order_by. That's a bit backwards and why I was confused it was working originally when `filters` was no longer relevant. Can you just invoke `order_by(desc(models.Port.created_at))` on the return value, please? See http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/core/sqlelement.html for docs.