Score for Vector Body

Call me hot target | smoldering host | caught with a machete | whacking the bush | stealing the green patina | from unendorsed forests | Interrogate the animals | over centuries | beginning with the furred vermin | those excellent vectors | Then pigs & cows | methane factories | I remain blameless | as they strafe the place | with the Mesopotamian plague | When the next epidemic | hits Constantinople | we blame the ships | freighted with wheat from Egypt | cargo of fleas | riding on the backs of rats | our ancestors

Willa Carroll’s Nerve Chorus (The Word Works, 2018) was noted in The Common as a “meticulously choreographed treatment of life as art.” Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Poem-A-Day, Tin House, The Slowdown and elsewhere. A finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize, she won Narrative Magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest and Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize, judged by Brenda Hillman. Demolition Suite, her forthcoming chapbook, was selected for the 2022 Split Rock Press Chapbook Competition. Her poetry films and multimedia collaborations have been featured in Interim Poetics, Narrative Outloud, and TriQuarterly. Awarded Best Poetry Film at the International Migration and Environment Film Festival, her work has screened at film festivals in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Denmark. Holding degrees from Bennington College, she’s based in upstate New York and NYC. willacarroll.com

Published October 15 2023