Inverted Syntax

SPOTLIGHT on an excerpt from Marie Williamson’s poem, “Panniculus Carnosus” published in Fissured VI | May 2025

“The hosanna in a hay fever

The heaven in a rising hemline

Caught in the rivulet of a fissured tongue—
Each Ponderosa side stitch”

🔗Link to the entire Fissured poem + writer & artist about statements can be found in our bio

We fell in love with this gorgeous little riot of a poem that twitches like its namesake muscle. Between sonic ricochets and unpredictable enjambments, you’ll find yourself in a full-on linguistic convulsion where sound is used to bring the poem to life, echoing Williamson’s reflection on her process (via Frank O’Hara), for the poem to be its own subject. “Panniculus Carnosus” turns the body into a whole ecstatic micro-universe, where language *should* get weird, grotesque, tiny, and should be holy as hell all at once.

⚡️About the Writer: Marie Williamson is a poet from Southeast Michigan. She received her MA in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University in 2022. Her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in Action, Spectacle, Cult. Magazine, Notre Dame Review, and Chicago Review. Currently, she is doing her best to be a well-adjusted adjunct as she teaches creative writing at her alma mater.

⚡️Featured Art: “Retraction” by J G Orudjev. Mixed media collage, 5 x 4 inches 2023
About the Artist: .g.orudjev.art J G Orudjev (she/her) is a mixed media artist, collagist, and sculptor living and working outside of Washington DC. Her work explores the nature of memory, transformative and transitory states, and the act and language of making meaning.

We’re looking for writing that disrupts with precision, unusual, but composed, work that fractures form with intent, language that is subverted and strained until it mutates into something so damn necessary.
If your writing is subversive yet disciplined, experimental and sharpened, we want it. If your language resists norms and knows exactly what it’s doing, submit submit!
Link in bio 💅🏽

🌞TWO POETRY CONTESTS:
🦩Sublingua Prize for Poetry (1st Book Award): for debut collections by female-identifying writers.
🦩Aggrey-Tabbikha Prize for Poetry: for any writer with first or second collections who identifies as Black and/or part of the S.W.A.N.A diaspora.

🌈Both contests EXTENDED until AUG 20

🪻$500 prize
🪻publication
🪻25 copies
🪻writing retreat to a Victorian mountain home in Colorado
🪻support with book launch

*Runners-up receive all the above except prize money.

▶️Checkout the guidelines and remember:
There’s no genre policing here.
No theme.
No prompt.
No framework.

We read with curiosity, not a checklist.