by Carella Keil
Jouissance
Pleasure is our first language:
milky sweetness, musky skin
against our cheek. Then
grass, water, mud, sun.
Some words, you say,
are untranslatable—
But speechlessness
doesn’t mean unsung—
Your touch says salt,
fingertips, tongue.
Farm girl, rock climber, and professor, Karen Kilcup feels fortunate to be getting old. Her book The Art of Restoration received the 2021 Winter Goose Poetry Prize, and Red Appetite received the 2022 Helen Kay Poetry Chapbook Prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has a forthcoming collection, Feathers and Wedges.
Carella Keil is a writer and digital artist who creates surreal, dreamy images that explore nature, fantasy realms, melancholia and inner dimensions. Her art has been published in a myriad of literary and art magazines, including Chestnut Review, Wander Magazine and Skyie Magazine, and featured on the covers of Glassworks Magazine, Colors: The Magazine, Frost Meadow Review, Nightingale & Sparrow, and forthcoming on the cover of Straylight Magazine. instagram.com/catalogue.of.dreams twitter.com/catalogofdream.