Country Music
So it is no use to explain the whimsical deaths
away – of autumn’s flowers and leaves.
The rocks are already dying. In the original want
of my youth, I believed myself the only one
with dredges of language placed at my feet
like the barren bodies of infants. I was born
just once, quick to call upon my nakedness.
I grew unashamed. My mother played
that song – I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.
She placed its tune to the small of my ear.
You know the one – the whippoorwill is always
lonesome. And that pure corpse of moo. . .
at its funeral. . .I cannot say what I said.
I am at a party. I am older. All the guests
converse with one another, their hands
whirling about like animals on a carousel.
They talk with those words they know best.
Today is Tuesday, October, a year. A year as strange
as all the rest of them. Yes I am yes I am
just as anybody see I weep to the crux of night.
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, Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, The Iowa 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, which was a Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize finalist in 2021 and 2022, was the winner of the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize, selected by Yale Younger Poets Prize winner Eduardo C. Corral, and published by Ghost Peach Press. 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 received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She now teaches high school English in Oakland, California.
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