Carine Topal
Winter 2023 | Poetry
Estrangement—like sacrifice—begins as a word at first,
-Carl Phillips, from “Monomoy”
Estrangement: to break up or breach, as in the valediction of the boy.
As in you be my Rubicon.
Birthright: a false sense of security; the foolish logic of well-being.
Loss: low levels of albumin cause the heart to fail. Had he a heart, it was breached
from birth. Comes from words meaning “failure to love.”
Shoplifting: a handy crime; a larceny of the heart, a thing pinched or nicked.
A fetal larceny. A slur.
Fleecing: a babe-in-the-woods breaks in on its own life blood. The soul is deaf to its
own demise; as in could talk but won’t; no parcel of legacy. No vestige of
ancestry.
Well: also known as justly, deeply, a source, a fountainhead; a nod to the mineshaft or
the verb to gush, as in the flow of blood or love. But none.
Carine Topal’s work has appeared in The Best of the Prose Poem, Greensboro Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and many other journals and anthologies. “Bed of Want,” her 2nd collection, won the 2007 Robert G. Cohen Prose Poetry Award. She is the recipient of the 2015 Briar Cliff Review Award for Poetry. Her prize-winning book, Tattooed, won the Palettes and Quills Chapbook contest. Topal’s 5th collection, “In Order of Disappearance,” was published in 2018 by Pacific Coast Poetry Series. She teaches poetry and memoir workshops in Redondo Beach and in the Palm Springs area.