This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from The Company Misery Loves by Kate Fox (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2024).
And Their Forecast
–For Brandi
I can still hear my mother’s defense:
“I did the best I could at the time.”
Which was right, her worth defined
by which fork we used, or the greater necessity
of shining hair, clean skin, the “personal care”
pamphlets I threw away in favor of how
we might be with our bodies: naked, unashamed.
I relied on the past to teach you—the slant
of her arm across your chest, the cool press
of her palm to your forehead when the world
was dizzy with snow and you could barely breathe.
The whistle of the vaporizer was her wisdom, too,
its lukewarm air curled around us like licorice.
Unwittingly, she taught us well how to sicken and heal.
Now I unravel my days with her rituals and habits
as every day your face grows more beautiful, distant.
I have taught you proper manners and speech,
and once in humid summer, the Latin names
of clouds and their forecast. You can still remember
“Mammatus,” pendulous black, boiling across Nebraska.
But what else? What else have I forgotten
in these daily rhythms we raise out of silence?
We all did our best, but what if it wasn’t enough,
was never enough, for any of us?
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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