This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Demolition Suite by Willa Carroll (Split Rock Press 2023).
Score for the Body as Cautionary Tale
Sing at the feast | bowls of gravel & wire | sawdust bread | rice
carved from the moon’s deciduous teeth | Wash it down | with
remediated rivers | ablated glaciers | hot blooded seas | Chase it |
with industrial slush | crude plumes | holy petroleum | Can you
hear the bells | runaway exponentials | ticking cells | Dress for
extreme weather | decked in feathers & tremors | Sun reddens at
noon | in forest fire conditions | as molecules sink into the water
table | as the field’s yellow | caution tape | ribbons the wind |
After the storm | my father’s hammer | craters the walls
Willa Carroll is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and writer. She’s the author of Nerve Chorus (2018) and Demolition Suite (2023), finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Poem-A-Day, The Slowdown, Tin House, and elsewhere. She’s the recipient of awards from Narrative Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Tokyo International Cinema Awards, and the International Migration & Environmental Film Festival. Her multimedia collaborations have been featured in EcoTheo, Interim, TriQuarterly, and film festivals in six countries. Her cross-genre performance work has been presented at numerous New York venues. With an MFA from Bennington College, she lived in NYC for twenty-five years and is now based upstate. 
Joey Gould, who served as 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), along with transfinity (forthcoming from Lambhouse Books). Their recent work appears in Solstice, Memezine, and Defunkt Magazine’s Surreal Confessional Anthology. They write book reviews as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys, and have also placed reviews in Glass: A Journal of Poetry and the Sundress blog.
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