This selection, chosen by guest editor nat raum, is from Split Daughter of Eve by Catherine Gonick (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025).
Being Treated as Dead
How tribal it feels, like being shunned
by Amish, shown the dirt
road out from a Pilgrim town,
forbidden to place a last offering
of flowers in a palm leaf
basket at the village shrine
in Bali. But even a family
of two sisters is a tribe.
A radioactive horse between us
couldn’t decay fast enough
for us to outlive its halflives.
She disowned me, left me
for dead, like a daughter
of Orthodox Jews who marries
a goy. Did she sit shiva,
cover mirrors? Does she light
yahrzeit candles? I’m wearing
a shroud, so can’t understand
how she can still send cards
for Christmas and my birthday,
containing still more cards entitling
me to free coffee. Is she buying
time? Will I be dead only for
a decade, like an ostracized
Athenian official? If life,
as a Buddhist teacher said,
boils down to three words,
not always so, do I try to detach
from both hope and fear?
I feel like Schrödinger’s cat,
condemned to remain
both dead and alive, or half
of an entangled pair of sub-atomic
particles that can’t unknow each other,
from any distance. After thirty
years of not speaking
to her sister, our dying
mother said, This is silly
I should call her, but didn’t.
Constellations revolve, above
and below the horizon.
Tracked by stars, malign
and kind—before death,
who can say what’s final?
Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Sheila-Na-Gig, The Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, The Orchards Poetry Journal, One Art, Of The Book, The Nu Review, Judith, Nashim, and The New Verse News. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Poetic License Press; Grabbed: Poets & Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing, Beacon Press; Dead of Winter 2021, Milk & Cake Press; Support Ukraine, Moonstone Press; and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice, Anhinga Press. Her poems have been featured in Verse Daily and Best American Poetry: Pick of the Week. She is a winner of the Ina Coolbrith Prize for Poetry and was a finalist in the Louisville Actors Theatre 10-Minute Play Contest. A native of California’s Bay Area, she lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband, and works with him in a company that slows the rate of global warming.
nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist, writer, and editor based on unceded Piscataway and Susquehannock land in Baltimore. They hold an MFA from the University of Baltimore and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Past and upcoming publishers of their work include Poet Lore, beestung, Baltimore Beat, Split Lip Magazine, BRUISER, and others. Find them online at natraum.com.
