42.2 Loisa Fenichell

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.