This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Iguana Iguana by Caylin Capra-Thomas, released by Deep Vellum in 2022.
Crosscut
So many girls are trying to tell you this: the line between the hurt body and the body that hurts is razor-thin and traversable like the trail we carved into the mountain to climb beyond the snow line and slip off. Pain, the happening. Pain, the procedure. Firewood is not the tree’s submission but the consequence of being rooted. One place will cut you down. Girls, this is not forever. We are not forever, but we will forever have been here. Clear-eyed and cross-legged in the crosscut clearing. Plain-toothed. Champion-toothed. The woodsman who walks the forest whistles grateful tunes to tall specters who arrive only in the shape of absence, apparition of light on the needled ground which once knew only shadow.
Caylin Capra-Thomas is the author of Iguana Iguana (Deep Vellum), as well as the chapbook Inside My Electric City (YesYes Books), and her poems and nonfiction have appeared in venues like Pleiades, Copper Nickel, New England Review, 32 Poems, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of fellowships and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Studios of Key West, she was the 2018-2020 poet-in-residence at Idyllwild Arts Academy. She lives in Columbia, Missouri, where she studies nonfiction, poetry, and ecocriticism in Mizzou’s PhD program, but she calls New England home.
Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference.
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