Isabelle Doyle
|
Girled-up and all aglow, my girl was shirtless in blue jeans with long hair. My girl was a tight fifteen for just the trees rustling up the pale yellow air. My girl was brambles up to her knees and cigarette butts chewed up in my girl’s big teeth and my girl was animals after other animals, and my girl was other animals. My girl was girl legs under black hair. My girl was part and parcel. My girl was all parts. My girl was agog in the well of her longing and my girl was a red mouth the size of an orchard opening up under fruit falling, and my girl’s mouth had a tongue that licked the stirrup before the boot, and my girl was the heel of the boot against the side, and my girl was the bridled body bucking the rider, and my girl was the dust kicked up by the galloping, and my girl was the galloping, and when my girl went escaping she never raced wrong— before my girl got gotten, my girl always got gone. |
Isabelle Doyle is the author of O'Riley (Jacar Press, 2021). She is the winner of the 2021 Jacar Press Chapbook Competition, a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2022 Best of the Net nominee, a semi-finalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Poetry Prize, and the winner of the 2018 Frances Mason Harris Prize at Brown University. Her writing has been published in The Los Angeles Review, Typo Magazine, Map Literary, Bending Genres, Jersey Devil Press, Ghost Parachute, DIALOGIST, and elsewhere. She currently is a Graduate Council Fellow and Truman Capote Literary Scholar at the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.