This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Auguries & Divinations by Heather Treseler (Bauhan Publishing 2024).
The Lucie Odes
V.
At your table, a slow rotation suggesting
permanence. By day, the dining room
served as an atelier where I prodded
and patched sentences, anchored at dry
salvages. By night, the apartment turned
salon of scientists, poets, unlonely widows,
an Olympic gymnast, a wry phlebotomist,
a felon. After tiring days at the lab, you
alchemized a perfect evening, converting
ordinary time into occasion, the planned
luck of good company. Girlish, we hung
glass baubles from the chandelier, sat
Dr. Fischer's ashy cigar by the window,
leavened the politics with poems, long
workdays with wine. I laughed, there,
in spite of myself. Dared to kiss your
regal forehead. Served as line chef,
steering clear of your stovetop's merry
burble. When we were alone, flopped
in bed or driving through the city,
listening to Aida or La Sonnambula,
I felt cherished as a comrade, confidant,
chérie. In our evident brokenness, love's
tacit fabric wove between us, incarnate.
Heather Treseler is the author of Auguries & Divinations (Apreril 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.
