/loisa fenichell

Forgive me for I am so much of this earth

When I talk about sparrows, gliding over the metropolis like an intimacy, I am not really talking about sparrows.

Once, I ate falafel in a windowless apartment, walked across an eclipsed land, sobbed like the cityscape from which

I had come. For a long time, I spoke of a man who called me by the name of another. He dressed callousness, pulled my hair

across wooden floorboards like stone. Tell me, for whom do you sing. What calls for your night to become. Is it I

who could ever, at times, conduct your thoughts. When you asked me to tell you a ghost-story, it was my ancestry I thought you meant,

woven into my being like a testament: how a wide woman came to this sirened world on an even wider ship; how once,

there were no airplanes; how I washed myself by no shore. We will never again become what we had always hoped to be. We are arriving,

never quite clutching onto the perfect past: we were boisterous; we fastened to one another. Did we not recognize one another.

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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, Tupelo Quarterly, Narrative Magazine, Washington Square Review, Poetry Northwest, 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 a Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize 2021 finalist. She has been the recipient of an award from Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and a finalist for the 2021 Narrative Magazine 30 Below contest. She is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.