November nights by Loisa Fenichell

There was a thrum of music, and even now, it is playing,
as the dusk turns purple like a woman. A friend tells
me of the moment when he first spotted
the one he would love. She stood, he says, silhouetted
by a sky whittled into a winter’s early onset of night.
Late November – the air throttles, chokes, and is withheld.
I walk, my quintessential lack of patience weighing
me down, as many other stories pass me by. In a museum,
paintings hang, done by an Australian woman
who is now dead, but who lived lonesome in a cabin.
Her hair reeked of failed spells and peppery eggs.
Her husband never loved her. In her self-portrait, she appears
severe. I could have loved her like a hunter. Could have returned
to our abode with a pink scaled fish hanging from its hook,
shouting, Supper’s here! The men I remember most
from my life were always severe, shaped by hangnails
of moon, the hangnails of moon so low to the earth
it seemed I’d be able to lick them, and they would taste
round as fists. The men did not love me because when
we spoke, I wanted to lick anything else – I was deficient
in all sorts of minerals. I write this to ward off death.
I wish to have sex with nobody. One morning,
I share a joke with a friend, telling her I’d like to take
a fork and a knife and carve into a pigeon, take a crunchy bite
of its skeletal device, just to honor the ones we’ve both lost.
My friend weeps. I could sit-cross legged, all toddler,
immature as such, atop an armoire built in Greece, saying
to you that every bit of my life is an etching of a bird rendered
in markers and crayons. Would you enjoy this lying? 
Some people adore doing a jig. Other men appreciate
returning home to their wives and children, all the while
trying not to look at their wives and children
I could have loved you. This is the simplest fact.

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Loisa Fenichell’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net ,   having been featured in journals such as Poetry Northwest. Her collection, Wandering In All Directions of this Earth , was published by Ghost Peach Press. She is currently a PhD student at University of Denver.

05 August 2024