Week 1: The Removal
you’re lucky
I’m a good fisher
she lets drops
of your body fall
to the floor
fish scales and water
thighs splayed wider
than you’d expected
who named you
ocean / river / well /
that’s it she says
puddle / flood / excess /
disposing the thin
plastic hooks
as though they took
no part of you
Julia Kolchinksy Dasbach emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee in 1993, when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and finalist for the Jewish Book Award; Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize; and 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2023. Her poems appear in POETRY, Blackbird, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, Lyric Witness: Intergenerational (Re)collection of the Holocaust in Contemporary American Poetry, pays particular attention to the underrepresented atrocity in the former Soviet territories. She is the Murphy Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix College and recently relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas with her two kids, cat, dog, and husband.