Loisa Fenichell
The trip to Tucson, Arizona to become sober
A bridge dots the surface below. Like a spell, I am no longer in Brooklyn.
Lukewarm pasta, bits of gray sauce, served in plastic.
I imagine the man who raped me. Gray sheets, etc.
This won’t do –
the plane is cold as the first rising of the morning,
as teeth marks around the concaves of the neck. What will happen
should a bird crash into this plane, its body bleeding apart, its entrails smeared
over this window? Next to me, a man wears a navy blue sweater – I would like to trust him.
When I met you, years ago, we walked in late February along the pale of the river.
Above, the lights from a single plane shone like a flock of violets. Inside,
the passengers tucked plastic forks into lukewarm pasta. A young girl
wailed – she could not name the shapes the clouds were taking on when they
bled into one another, became one kingdom, hovered about the plane.
Loisa Fenichell’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets, and has been featured or is forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, “all these urban fields,” was published by nothing to say press and her collection, “Wandering in all directions of this earth,” is the winner of the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize, selected by Eduardo C. Corral and forthcoming from Ghost Peach Press in 2023. She is the winner of the 2021 Bat City Review Editors' Prize, has been a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 2021 30 Below contest, a runner-up for Tupelo Quarterly's Tupelo Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the Dorianne Laux / Joe Millar prize. She has been the recipient of an award from Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, will be graduating from Columbia University’s MFA program come August of 2023, and will be a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at University of Denver come Fall of 2023.
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