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SOME KIND OF OPENING // BACK

POETRY
Mothering
Loisa Fenichell

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00:00 / 01:51

The day my bleeding stopped, I arrived in the first city. I was no longer
a large body in the grass. Dipped my left toe into the polluted river. Carried an infant


across my back, into museums, into buildings tall as horses. I rode
a horse through the park. Made a mistake: sat in the church – myself Jewish –


and missed everybody. Missed the sounds the leaves made as they scraped
against the old cabin window like a wedding day. Missed my own wedding,


which never actually happened, but I remembered the months when the infant
grew in my womb, the fog dying all around my chest. I wandered through


the flowers of the botanical garden like a minister, the infant cradled
between my hands like a home. The infant weeping. The infant and I both animal


as the dead whale found on the city beach in December. She had eyes like mine.
She felt her hunger, shrouded around her, though I could not feel my own.

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, Washington Square Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, "all these urban fields," was published by nothing to say press, and her manuscript, "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 is currently a first-year MFA candidate in Poetry at Columbia University.

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