Loisa Fenichell
Data
I want to live like my friend J., who believes
in the speckled green coats of the aliens.
Who believes in the aliens at all. The fridge
in the house in the new city
is silver and cold as the river I’ve left,
the one I will not see in February. Tacked
to its broad, glinting, confusingly clean
surface is a magnet advertising a diner
in which I’ve never sat – have never visited
to drink a Bloody Mary or to eat a hamburger,
no bun, cooked rare. And there is a postcard
with a photograph of a mountain range,
its mountains plucked from the ground like fat,
purple radishes, their tips pointy like discolored
teeth. I find myself tiptoeing
through the cavernous door of risk –
I have become my own therapist.
I cannot remember my name.
My name is not therapist. I have seen all
the new streams this new city has to offer.
Their muds rise and fall, living, first,
like some people’s romances, and then dying, dead
as the romantic poets, with whittled white fish bones
and pale pink fish carcasses tucked into their thick,
brown weights. What’s in a name? Two
of the romantic poets were named William.
My own name is nothing, is empty as air, though air
is everything. I suck at the air, its lacking form –
it is not at all shaped like a nipple. Save for this one cloud…
Today, I looked on as a stranger looked up.
He, too, had seen a cloud. He was chanting,
disenchantingly, UFO!, UFO! I texted a friend:
I’m so done with people. But, God – I’m not.
Every day I believe myself in love even when
the object of desire does not exist. I envision him
growing from the ground like the mountains
or pulled down to this earth from a plush,
cashmere-gray sky. He walks towards me –
he, too, does not know anything about me.
Loisa Fenichell reads “Data”
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 collection, Wandering in all directions of this earth 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 received her MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She is now a PhD student in English Literary Arts at University of Denver.