CONTRAPASTORAL
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett | Poetry
When you find me
prone, enumerating
mosses or observing
a banana slug’s trek
up redwood, know
I’ve turned, sighing,
from the great works
of men, dumped like
the moldering couch
beside a county road;
renounced language,
all misunderstanding;
shook off the cobwebs
of names. So little of
me isn’t plastic, glass,
concrete. What am I,
on my knees, without
the squawking I took
for words? A dragonfly
hovers here in the air,
but I cannot describe
him. I wouldn’t dare.
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 Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, The Common, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for the Whiting Award–winning LGBTQIA2S+ literary journal and press Foglifter.