I cut open my breath in the cold. Lean forward into the winter and watch as each tree on my property topples over like a miniature stream. Strangers’ faces are carved into the birdhouse that dangles in the front-yard. Each morning the faces are bruised and pecked at thanks to the snowy animals. Each face I pass on the sidewalk looks like yours. Many mornings, I walk the length of a single block and then turn back home. It is always the same block and, in some cases, the same stories, which my father tells during winter evenings at the dinner table. I remember the stories like one long song played during an even longer car ride, an icing of horizon along the road: my grandmother and her breast cancer; another aunt, who committed suicide long prior to my birth. I have been told that, like a bird, I take best after my grandmother. Come bedtime, check for lumps along my chest: evenings during which I position myself as my own kind of adoration.
Loisa Fenichell
Loisa Fenichell's work has been featured or is forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Palette Poetry, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, all these urban fields, was published by nothing to say press. She will be an MFA candidate at Columbia University come Fall of 2021.
