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My Heart-Rattled Tree!


   



I tell anybody who will listen that my twin has a sweet sister.
And my twin, his phantom always besides me, says—you, you,
my dear, are the sister. My twin was once a brother
so dear to my mind, to my navel. His hair was always combed
with soft ridges like a clam shell. We were young
when we shared a bed. The bed was coated in fog.
The bedroom walls, with its flashlights and shadow puppets,
forever closed in on us. My mother never did yell at my twin.
Why would she have? He was a boy. His name was Moses.
Moses and I most wanted to belong to the miracles of life.
My mother did not expect us to both emerge from her womb
like little Venuses. My parents had his name all picked out.
They called me lost, lost again. When we were born, we both had
heads full of hair. Our hairs were brown like puppies.
This is where our similarities ended. He was thin. I was fat!
He adored me. Once, I asked my dad for a dog. My twin insisted,
was with me all the way—let her get that dog! Even from his bath,
where he bathed, he screamed, screamed again. His hair did up in fire.







Loisa Fenichell’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets, and has been featured or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Washington Square Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, all these urban fields, was published by nothing to say press and her collection, Wandering in all directions of this earth, which was a Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize finalist in 2021 and 2022, was the winner of the 2022 Ghost Peach Press Prize. She is the winner of the 2021 Bat City Review Editors’ Prize, has been a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 2021 30 Below contest, a runner-up for Tupelo Quarterly’s Tupelo Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the Dorianne Laux / Joe Millar prize. She has received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and Community of Writers and holds an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University.