open question
by Carla Sarett
that guy I dated
maybe
twice
we touched once
maybe not
before
I saw her shot
in black and
white
naked like an
Irving Penn his
ex-
lover a dancer he’d
hung her
over
his shiny new sofa
in the East
80s
in a chilly decade
I can’t recall
his
face but her
slim back
arched
her face turned
down I wonder
why
Carla Sarett is a poet, essayist and fiction writer based in San Francisco. Her recent poems appear in Blue Unicorn, San Pedro River Review, Dust Poetry, Prole and elsewhere. She awaits publication of her novella, The Looking Glass (Propertius) in October, and in 2022, a full-length novel, A Closet Feminist (Unsolicited).
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “open question”? This piece “open question” began with my memory of an image– the naked woman. I am fascinated by our relationship to images, and how they situate us in the world. I worked on it as a prose poem, and failed to get the sense of displacement I wanted, and then decided to shape it so the lines themselves are more puzzling.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
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Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/15 • Abbie Doll
09/22 • Karen Regen Tuero
09/29 • Amy Speace
10/06 • Jennifer Edwards
10/13 • Joseph O’Day
10/20 • Carolyn Zaikowski
10/27 • Sunmisola Odusola
11/03 • Sara Cassidy
11/10 • Liz Abrams-Morley
11/17 • TBD
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