This selection, chosen by guest editor Merrick Sloane, is from Spoil by Alyse Bensel (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2024).
Shotgun
Let’s start with her, pregnant, you,
unknowing, then knowing, me,
learning. I’m tired of this narrative
I’ve numbed to, like a twelve-gauge
fired off too many times against
my shoulder. I used to watch
my father disassemble and clean
his guns, then put them back together.
My non-pregnancy is an anti-narrative.
The hollow in my throat
constricts as I’m written out.
People ask me why I know so much
about motherhood and childbirth.
They ask me how many children
I have. I reply, none. The narrative stops.
A wedding, an ultrasound,
a countdown to when you disappear.
I cease to matter. My potential
children don’t exist. I met a woman
who married because, two months
into dating, she took antibiotics.
Her son was round and luminous.
She could not believe he existed.
We discussed caesareans,
mastitis, stitches, the slow
healing process. Postpartum.
She asked me to find
her husband. He ignored her.
The shotgun’s primary parts:
the barrel most of all, where you
pull the snake through, scrub
the chokes, clean apparent filth
off the action. Who made
the weapon? Who harbored it?
I have the story out of order.
There are too many moving parts
I mistook for an opportunity
to clear this up. I keep on missing
everything you left out.
This narrative may not
hit its intended mark. I blame
any misfire on my ignorance.
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.
