Chad Foret
Winter 2026 | Poetry
Watching The Fly With You
after Frank O’Hara
is even more sad than seeing yellow narcissus so lonely they lose fragments of their faces
in a film about sentient furniture like the fusion of Seth, fly & teleporter pod
partly because in your green shirt you look like a self-portrait of a flower newly in love
partly because Seth lost his likeness, partly because of your faith in hummingbird food
partly because your eyes are plasma pools in which even insects can politic
partly because the last gasp of a nightmare baboon is terrible proof of steak’s poetry
it is hard to pretend when I’m with you that I wasn’t swapped with something better
the moment we met & my original body is off playing with all the other primates
in a heaven for horrors but I’m here now with the secrets only we have seen like
how even emerald envies Bayou Amulet the moon worming over Bunkie
& as Brundlefly’s secret face emerges like all the other tragic glaciers calving
in the corners I feel like the final Seth a piece of jaw watching from the floor
I buzz
about Breton’s Lark how the woman’s scythe almost sends the sun away eyes stuck
on the scream of a horned bird somewhere in a separate wing of the Art Institute & anyway
I would rather sit with you & watch the fullest tick of all time squirm on the South Wabash
sidewalk or learn how robbers burned the bandages of Sebekemsaf’s consort & wonder
why or whisper in the aisle seat can you hear the corn below calling out to us
between quinoa & wing glint beyond the art all the aspects of earthshine crowding Seurat
the white Christ zeitgeist to all the future tourists touching a piece of airplane
chair like samples of feldspathic breccia & shergottite going where the art is & letting
the umbrellas have their life
it seems we were not cheated of some excellent sadness
which is Ronnie & Seth going to waste in a warehouse which is telling us how to stay human
"Chad Foret is a writer and editor from southeast Louisiana. Recent poetry and fiction appear or are forthcoming in If Memory Serves, a food writing anthology from Good, Printed Things; Action, Spectacle; Fairy Tale Review; Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine; San Pedro River Review; and other journals and anthologies. He is the author of Scenes from a Rain Country (Lavender Ink, 2022) and Watching Machine (Osmanthus, 2026). Visit www.chadforet.com or follow @chad4a on Instagram for info and updates."