Salamander 2025 Fiction Contest

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The Universe’s Attraction to Entropy

Moriah Cohen
| poetry

 

it’s not desire but a constellation
of semi-filled Mason jars scattering
the nightstand but the recognition
of cedar bending space between us
but a chipmunk chasing its tail
in a back patch of ivy but all the prickly
pears waxing yellow flowers all
but the lark last tink tink of eggs
knocking down the well of my body
but the desire to be wanton and fabric
but the fabric of grapefruit
melting on my tongue but a sun turned
blood orange smoke from wildfires
dusting cupped petals but air swooning
heavy with water but America scorching
itself to the root to test if it’s perennial
but every hoodie forgotten beneath
a classroom chair but a woodpecker
hammering gutters but the author
telling us in the title the protagonist
will die but the kind of suffering
that is its own unconscious penitence
but a tableau of my father after his surgery
hunched in television’s blue light
but my oldest was leaving for college
but the lilac wailing sweet and honey
but we hurled our primate bodies
against a darkness in which crooning
your name in your ear was already
the unraveling of the sound

A 2023 New Jersey Council on the Arts poetry fellow, Moriah Cohen is the author of the chapbook Impossible Bottle (Finishing Line Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Adroit Journal, Narrative, Gulf Coast, and RHINO, among others. Cohen lives in New Jersey, where she teaches creative writing at a local high school.

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