Loisa Fenicell
Summer 2023 | Poetry
Saturday
I was at a bar – an olive pit
stuck in my tooth, another underneath my tongue.
Was talking about summer. Meant grief.
Told a bad joke – an attempt
at fitting in
with even the bluest kinds of horizons.
See? Even being a heroine
means something! Like walking
by a flock of geese
while above, pigeons circle a roof like smoke.
At dusk, bits of cloud splash across the sky
like an impressionist painting. To marry an impressionist!
To solve that lonely thing, which makes the night
the night – that lack, save
for the presence of the shadows trampling
along the walls like dog paws. I was at the bar.
I wanted a new voice and then I unraveled that want.
That my old vernacular might seep into me
like tea. My life? A return to grief, a nostalgia unwinding
for Alice, my first doll, who now hides in the closet.
She’s missing an arm.
She’s dirty as the Hudson.
Loisa Fenichell’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net 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 and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University, where she holds the Writers’ Scholarship.
Loisa recommends Tess Gunty's book, The Rabbit Hutch, and Eve Babitz' book, Slow Days, Fast Company, as well as the film, Manchester By The Sea.