Pushcart Nomination Announcement

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our fifth nominee for this year’s Pushcart Prize is Sally Wen Mao’s poem “Seance for the Living” (35.1).

Read the excerpt below, then purchase a subscription to Pleiades here.

 

Sally Wen Mao

Seance for the Living

 

You once said: the remnant prairie is also not love,

however long it frets. But I stood in the center

of that knoll, knee-deep

in algae, fretting, Always about to flail or faint

 

or slip inside some permanent disguise. Bear! cries

the forest. Entrails! the jays echo back. All summer

I wore a dead girl’s dresses.

Bought them at a rummage sale in a cold cathedral. […]