This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from The Company Misery Loves by Kate Fox (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2024).
Analogous
Raccoons can be landscapes, reared up on their hind legs
against the fence, body in cat burglar stance, ready for any
tricks the motion sensor attempts. Wrecked cars can be
landscapes—Christmas presents crumpled and torn
in the back seat. Who bought them? And for whom?
Where were they headed before taking this detour?
Who designed the wrapping paper to mimic falling
snow, candy canes? Mirrors can most certainly
be landscapes, reflect whatever comes before them, then
tuck whatever’s left down deep in memory’s silver pocket.
Wishes can become landscapes, once they are pulled
from the bone, all tinsel and prediction, whistle and grit,
entrusted with fixing on the horizon whatever appears
to be broken or undone. Turkey vultures, though,
are quintessential landscapes. They perch like tilted
weathervanes along the roof line, sample the wind
for that cadaverous scent that lifts these raptors by their
six-foot wingspans to soar on updrafts until they locate
what today’s buffet special will be. Then they land
like staggering sailors, hunker down, and begin to eat.
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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