This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Auguries & Divinations by Heather Treseler (Bauhan Publishing 2024).
Haruspication
You call from San Mateo, where
the twin orange trees are still
wreathed in smoke, and the doe
in the yard appears to wheeze
as she grazes damp earth: your
unlikely perilous paradise of quakes
and fires, gold rush and farrago,
a shelf of shiny toys about to slide
from Nob Hill into glittering sea.
Yet you call with news bulletins
from dreams’ timely intuitions—
be careful around small dogs, wear blue
on Tuesday, add turmeric for ache,
avoid jeeps and spinach in car-wreck
and E. coli season, don’t trust
that “handsy” date. Your well-
schooled mind hasn’t stopped
being a radio tower of premonition:
belated notes from the wistful
dead, a portable Ouija board
and divining plate, spelling out
the witcheries of fate. I trust
in little else—in no one god
or given creed. No friend, wrote
Rossetti, like a sister. No prophet
either. Who better to forecast
the weather of wish or near
disaster than the first girl
to slip into my bed, murmuring
syllables with the lilt of speech.
You are an ancient nesting bird,
unsinged by fire or the salt
of oceans, you are a Roman
needing no knife for divination:
to account the delicate organs,
to palpate each telltale sign.
Heather Treseler is the author of Auguries & Divinations (April 2024), which received the May Sarton Prize, and Parturition, which received the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize. Her poems appear in Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, and The American Scholar, and have received Narrative magazine’s annual poetry prize and the W. B. Yeats Prize. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and a professor of English at Worcester State University.
Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.
