This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from Spoil by Alyse Bensel (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2024).
Facebook Messenger Pastoral
I say prairie. You say nowhere
close enough to the ocean.
On your drive to work the sunlight
glaring off the mountains
must be the same that filters
through my Midwestern paned
windows. From my landlocked island
I trace the Kaw’s path, a thread
in the embroidery of rivers
that feeds into the gulf. A salt
cure for distance. But I won’t write to you
about how last night a man at the bar
overheard me say your island’s
name in my mouth.
He summoned those mountains
on his phone. El Yunque. Direct flights
are cheap, he reminded me. I choked
on my pineapple vodka. All these
years are for nothing.
I do not leave. You do not return.
Alyse Bensel is the author of Spoil (SFASU Press, 2024) and Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) as well as three chapbooks, including Lies to Tell the Body (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in Cream City Review, Pleaides, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. Originally born and raised in south-central Pennsylvania, she now lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina, where she is an associate professor of English at Brevard College and director of the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a neuro-Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet, editor, and researcher from Oklahoma who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. They hold an MFA in creative writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and are Associate Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review. Merrick’s work has appeared in The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality, Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication, BLEACH!, citizen trans* {project}, Arcana Poetry and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and ANMLY. Merrick’s poetry was recently selected as a winner of the Garden Party Collective’s contest on Neurodivergence / Intersectionality and as a winner for AWP’s 2025 Intro Journal Awards. Their work has received support from the DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium and Sundress Publications. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved.
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