I ate a dream, as it often goes. Went to a party
dressed in overalls. Tried to ask people
questions about themselves, their lives,
their beverages. Tried to avoid speaking
about myself. It’s true! I’m a narcissist.
Not even in the fashionable way. I do not
wander pastures looking for a pond.
Why bother? A mirror hangs over
the closet door. I stare into it with a desire to vomit.
I thought I was getting better. The way
I am able to satisfy a lover. I would rather
open a jar of jam with one hand. You are the lover.
You want just once to hear about the dream.
It’s getting old. It’s about a woman I love
so significantly that I drown her in the heat
of a starkly green river. When I wake up, dead rats
hang about the gutter. I could carve into one, just
to taste it. I used to fold the people who hated
me into my backside like kitchen knives. Now,
I wear gray sweaters because my mother
tells me to. Language is manipulative. You
wonder if I am manipulating you now. If I am,
it’s by accident. It’s my strange charm.

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!”