4 Poems by Loisa Fenichell
At a party in winter
your own limbic structure sits
in the corner of a darkening room.
You have not been asked to leave.
You are not celebrating anything.
The cat’s eyes observe your stillness
while outside snow falls onto
the balcony, jaggedly as bits of bad breath.
You are exactly like the rest of them –
you hold within you no museums.
You have teeth and probably some cavities
and you have been injured. You adore
being loved against the backdrop of a slow song.
The music is comprised of quick beats
like a light switch that has just been flipped on.
No light switches have been flipped on.
There has been the lighting of candles
as though preparing for a hurricane.
The snow continues to fall. People move
and mill about like water in a bath.
It would be lovely to take a bath.
You hoist yourself from your corner.
You are not stuck. You remind yourself
of gratitude when you enter the bathroom
and there is no line to wait on
and you have not had to dress for a funeral.
Many days pass and every day it is as though
the funeral has occurred yesterday. In the bathroom,
you wash your hands. You splash your face.
You use that same water to swirl
it about the inside of your mouth,
your cheeks puffed out. You want
to remember everybody – everybody
you have ever loved. You want to be gracious.
You have grieved enough, enough. There are
worse things than to feel like a hideous woman.
Outside, the sky is bloated, soaked in night.
Making you wait
I would like to think it was the sun
that moved me like a riddle set in motion,
a riddle set coursing through the body.
Yesterday, I had sex with you. It was
empty pleasure. It was sky barren
with slacked color. It’s not so simple
to describe this hatred for men –
even the men I love. The women.
The people. I want one person. One person
to sit beside me in a bathtub
the way artichokes sit in a kitchen sink. It’s true:
I fear the co-opting of language – some things
are obvious, palpable as bits of clam shell.
I’m sorry. I’m still running late. But
won’t you come flying with me over a clustering
of valleys? Won’t you help me to lick
stones along a beach because of our
mutual deficiency? I will come to meet you
eventually. We will stare at the ocean. It will
be gray, open. There will be a ship in
the distance that we will be unable to sail on.
On some sentimental jealousy
I wanted to write about the one you loved before: a woman, alone,
her hand curled around a glass of milk. Her hair
long as a road, steep and thick as a mountain. It’s dawn now, regrets
from the night before percolating like lupines in grayish mist
or like a collection of brackish water. Some time ago,
I dreamt of a photograph of a farm, a few pale
chickens dotting the green. It was later
that I found the photograph tacked to your wall.
It calmed me like a winter’s first snow – January
and I wear the same blue dress every day, grow fat
on bulbous insects. A couple of cockroaches
are in the sink and I pretend they are married.
I imagine you must lie. I do, too: a feral bear haunts the forest
behind the parents’ house; a field crackles to the sky, its whiplash
of fire. Buildings rest so far apart from one another –
the woman is still on my mind – but I am just a slight bit less alone.
Thursday is tragic
I walk to the deli and realize I am not
in love. In other words I bear witness
to the city
at night
when I am classically
alone. This
is tragedy to its core. I learn to write essays. On hubris. The fall
of the hero. Really it’s all laid out in Sophocles’ play. I am only studying
the darkness because I’ve stopped being able
to write. I walk to Chinatown and hold the dead fish
between my palms and fill myself
on pork dumplings. There’s that moment
in the play: Oedipus begins to weep, tears tumbling
to the soil like earthquakes. It’s not until after I’ve left
California that I am reminded of the earthquakes. And that fire season
is real as cracked eggs or the tree outside my narrow building.
your own limbic structure sits
in the corner of a darkening room.
You have not been asked to leave.
You are not celebrating anything.
The cat’s eyes observe your stillness
while outside snow falls onto
the balcony, jaggedly as bits of bad breath.
You are exactly like the rest of them –
you hold within you no museums.
You have teeth and probably some cavities
and you have been injured. You adore
being loved against the backdrop of a slow song.
The music is comprised of quick beats
like a light switch that has just been flipped on.
No light switches have been flipped on.
There has been the lighting of candles
as though preparing for a hurricane.
The snow continues to fall. People move
and mill about like water in a bath.
It would be lovely to take a bath.
You hoist yourself from your corner.
You are not stuck. You remind yourself
of gratitude when you enter the bathroom
and there is no line to wait on
and you have not had to dress for a funeral.
Many days pass and every day it is as though
the funeral has occurred yesterday. In the bathroom,
you wash your hands. You splash your face.
You use that same water to swirl
it about the inside of your mouth,
your cheeks puffed out. You want
to remember everybody – everybody
you have ever loved. You want to be gracious.
You have grieved enough, enough. There are
worse things than to feel like a hideous woman.
Outside, the sky is bloated, soaked in night.
Making you wait
I would like to think it was the sun
that moved me like a riddle set in motion,
a riddle set coursing through the body.
Yesterday, I had sex with you. It was
empty pleasure. It was sky barren
with slacked color. It’s not so simple
to describe this hatred for men –
even the men I love. The women.
The people. I want one person. One person
to sit beside me in a bathtub
the way artichokes sit in a kitchen sink. It’s true:
I fear the co-opting of language – some things
are obvious, palpable as bits of clam shell.
I’m sorry. I’m still running late. But
won’t you come flying with me over a clustering
of valleys? Won’t you help me to lick
stones along a beach because of our
mutual deficiency? I will come to meet you
eventually. We will stare at the ocean. It will
be gray, open. There will be a ship in
the distance that we will be unable to sail on.
On some sentimental jealousy
I wanted to write about the one you loved before: a woman, alone,
her hand curled around a glass of milk. Her hair
long as a road, steep and thick as a mountain. It’s dawn now, regrets
from the night before percolating like lupines in grayish mist
or like a collection of brackish water. Some time ago,
I dreamt of a photograph of a farm, a few pale
chickens dotting the green. It was later
that I found the photograph tacked to your wall.
It calmed me like a winter’s first snow – January
and I wear the same blue dress every day, grow fat
on bulbous insects. A couple of cockroaches
are in the sink and I pretend they are married.
I imagine you must lie. I do, too: a feral bear haunts the forest
behind the parents’ house; a field crackles to the sky, its whiplash
of fire. Buildings rest so far apart from one another –
the woman is still on my mind – but I am just a slight bit less alone.
Thursday is tragic
I walk to the deli and realize I am not
in love. In other words I bear witness
to the city
at night
when I am classically
alone. This
is tragedy to its core. I learn to write essays. On hubris. The fall
of the hero. Really it’s all laid out in Sophocles’ play. I am only studying
the darkness because I’ve stopped being able
to write. I walk to Chinatown and hold the dead fish
between my palms and fill myself
on pork dumplings. There’s that moment
in the play: Oedipus begins to weep, tears tumbling
to the soil like earthquakes. It’s not until after I’ve left
California that I am reminded of the earthquakes. And that fire season
is real as cracked eggs or the tree outside my narrow building.
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.
