This feature, chosen by Guest Editor Catherine Garbinsky, is from Familiar by Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (Madhouse Press 2024).
The hag stands in moonlight
torn by its passage through
blinds. Resisting the urge to
wake A, who’ll say no one’s
here, I pull covers tighter as
she explains, she’s traveling
to when that boy led us into
the woods, hammered agate
until its bright guts showed.
She’ll stop him. I move to take
her hand18—one who was there,
though we barely remember,19
____________
18 “The ‘night sea journey’ is the journey into the parts of ourselves
that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled
to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness,” Stephen Cope.
19 “The more adrenaline you secrete, the more precise your memory
will be. But that is true only up to a certain point. Confronted with
horror—especially the horror of ‘unescapable shock’—this system
becomes overwhelmed and breaks down.”
but she steps back, just asks,
should she keep trying? I nod.
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett (she/her) is the author of Mud in Our Mouths (Northwestern University Press, 2025) and Look Alive (Cowles Poetry Book Prize, Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2021), along with numerous chapbooks, most recently Lossland (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press). Her poetry can be found in Ninth Letter, swamp pink, Poetry Northwest, and
elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQIA2S+ literary journal and press Foglifter. She was raised in the wilds of Tennessee and now lives in the SF Bay Area with her wife and rescue dog.
Catherine Garbinsky (she/they) is a writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee. They received their MFA in Poetry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where they are now a PhD candidate. Catherine’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She has written two chapbooks: All Spells Are Strong Here (Ghost City Press, 2018) and Even Curses End (Animal Heart Press, 2019), and her work has been featured in Yes Poetry, Coffin Bell Journal, Cream City Review, and elsewhere.
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