I could check the weather in Berkeley, California
via an app. I did and I do. Research photographs
of Steller’s jays – blue and black. I don’t mean
to suggest a bruise. This is just my own reflex. Suggest
the wind of the most natural world –
the wind that strikes like the smart whip
and curl of a blanket. Suggest the markings
this wind must leave. Myself tucked into myself.
More selves. Solving math problems as a child.
I have said it, that I am sorry, many times
over. To forgive is on my to-do list. Around the corner
is a building just as red as the fire escapes that jut
out of its front walls. There are more of these
buildings, too. When I first came to New York,
I was born here. It was the back of a taxicab, just short
of a hospital. I grow car sick so easily now. In
the back of a car, the other night, Flushing to Bed-Stuy,
it was a Saturday. I was migrating back to my oldest
body. The only flushed body I’ve ever had. This winter
is the tallest man, this in January, with more height
to come. In a letter to a lover, I tell him it has yet to snow.
He lives one neighborhood away from me.
I describe to him the oyster shell he’s been using
to cut my own sustenance into halves, into quarters.
The shell is gray and tough and bumpy to the touch.
Nighttime is perpetually the moon. So of course
we all notice. Of course, this world does. And when I comb
through my sketches of this oyster shell, when I place
just one of the sketches into an envelope, it is night.
The moon is the shell – the shell the moon. I am tired.

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, 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, will be graduating from Columbia University’s MFA program come August of 2023, and will be a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at University of Denver come Fall of 2023.

Maria Rendón was born and raised in Mexico City where she received a BFA from Universidad Anáhuac; she currently resides in California. She received her second BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and completed her MFA at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2014. Exhibitions include: “Shift, Stretch, Expand: Everyday Transformations” at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (Satellite),“GLAMFA” at California State Long Beach, “Unholy Mess” at Santa Barbara Museum of Art – McCormick House, and “Just Between Us” at Sullivan Goss. Her work is featured in New American Paintings #123, Graphis #355 and Taschen’s book, “Illustration Now!”