This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Demolition Suite by Willa Carroll (Split Rock Press 2023).
Score for Somnambulant Body
Begin in rivers | green with leached nitrogen | Begin in dirt
underfoot | Listen to the insect chorus | microbe empire | My
father sleeps in the loam | in the low clay | I’m accountable only to
the wind | & rocks shedding their skins | in acid laced rain | I lie
under a blue tarp ceiling | dreaming a modern ark | with a hole in its
hull | All morning gone | swimming in the marrow | All afternoon
spent | in the wet archive | behind the eyes | After the flood | salt
kills the pines | Out in another scorched forest | animal bones are
slow | skull a bowl | Our dust on loan | from a shapely nebula
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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