Issue 4: Echoes

One Side of an Interview with Lot’s Nameless Wife, Speaking as a Pillar of Salt

after Hanif Abdurraqib and Eve L. Ewing

Paula Turcotte

A: when it comes down to it aren’t we all running from something?

A: those angels, always turning up where they aren’t wanted.

A: you should know by now every story needs a villain.

A: show me a man who’s seen god and i’ll show you a baby and his bathwater.

A: not painful so much as disorienting.

A: garden-variety transfiguration, far as i can tell. one minute you’re cells and the next you’re sodium chloride.

A: everyone wants to think they wouldn’t look back.

A: ask me again when your blisters split.

A: it seems that this is about shame.

A: like orange peels, actually.

A: my daughters? they just kept going. didn’t even stop to lick me goodbye.

Paula Turcotte lives in Moh'kins'stis/Calgary. She is the author of the chapbook Permutations (Baseline Press, July 2024). Her work has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review's Far Horizons Poetry Prize, and her poems appear in Canthius, CV2, Arc Poetry, and elsewhere.