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.

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