This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from The Company Misery Loves by Kate Fox (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2024).
Dinner at the Manifest Restaurant
I don’t love you enough to tell you
that this vague sickness passing through
the table into the breaded veal and potatoes
is proximity
made unbearable by the distraction
of wine, convex and bleeding
over the lip of the goblet.
Nor do I love you enough
to tell you that I refuse to accept this
steady disintegration of a Sunday—
when the week has slid downhill
on all fours, and you wait for the light
to drop with some grace
behind the ridge, wait, backlit,
looking out on what has ultimately become
the cruelty of your life: this cul-de-sac
with its ledge of forced narcissus,
and before you, your hands
puckered by the slick and tepid water.
I want to tell you I don’t love you
enough to admit the identity of this cuisine,
these thin-sleeved afternoons that can slip into frost
just as everyone has traded their coats for amazement,
and even the goldfinches are taken in enough to expect
fresh berries with the thaw. Yet here we sit, party
to the same old digressions: pleasure and sweat,
flesh that loves itself, regardless.
Kate Fox is the author of The Company Misery Loves (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), a collection of poems published in July 2024, and two poetry chapbooks: The Lazarus Method, winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Competition (Kent State University Press) and Walking Off the Map (Seven Kitchens Press). Her work has appeared in Great River Review, Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, Valparaiso Review, and Pleiades. Her poem “The Heaven of Lost Limbs” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poem, “No Word for Those Who Lose a Child,” was a finalist in Cutthroat Literary Magazine’s Joy Harjo Poetry Competition. She lives in Athens OH with her partner, writer and Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott, and their two English setters, Katie and Patch.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, and Editor-in-Chief at beestung. They are an editor on the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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