This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Auguries & Divinations by Heather Treseler (Bauhan Publishing 2024).
First Grief
Late to love, later still to marriage,
they assumed little, having foraged
for each other. So even as the signs
seemed clear and Sophia's courses
stopped, they knew the danger
in forecasts, whims of wind
and weather, and spoke little
of their gathered hope. So when
she slipped from the stalwart arm
of her beloved and fell hard against
the frozen face of Concord River,
she tried not to regard the basket
of blood as more than an accident.
A freak fall, a first loss demanding
of them more tenderness—and stern
reminder, in newlywed bliss,
of the dark currents that swell
and course beneath gray ice, how
a sudden crack in winter's river
devours as quick as any storied
tragedy. What had begun in
a sweet flood of four limbs,
pulsing blood, and a narrow
bed, swum as if black water.
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.
