PROSE POETRY
CAROLINE FAIREY MEESE
If while flying over the ocean
my plane glided safely splashing down near a pebbled tidal inlet and I sewed a palm-leaf skirt and built signal fires on the beach flaring purple with Snickers wrappers and eventually came to terms with my self-sufficient lifelong isolation and had to bring one book with me, it would ideally not be Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, which I’m reading on this turbulent flight while my knees bounce and my hangnails bleed and my hands keep drifting toward the edges of the EXIT escape hatch. Even if lately I’ve been feeling like a skipping record, even if the carry-ons and takeoff texts get me dreaming of sea turtle soup and a sky without rescue, the paper thing I am holding onto demands of me more life lived less alone.
Caroline Fairey Meese edits composition and literature textbooks at W. W. Norton. Her debut chapbook, LOWERCOUNTRY, will be published by elsewhere micro-press in 2025. Her poetry can be found in Carolina Muse, Broadkill Review, SplashLand, Corvid Queen, and storySouth, among other publications. She currently edits reviews for the Southern Review of Books, and has served as a prose editor at the Adroit Journal, a manuscript reader for Hub City Press, and a workshop leader at 826michigan. She lives in Queens with her husband, though they also call South Carolina home.
