Isabelle Ghabash writes from the Great Salt Lake valley, where family history from Lebanon and Germany meets a practice steeped in archetype, folklore, and dream. Her poems have appeared in local public art installations and anthologies, as well as independent international magazines. Isabelle channels the wise voice of the moon every month on her Substack, Interview the Moon. Her first poetry chapbook, Venus in Scorpio (Moon in the Rye Press, 2026), will be available in September 10.

For this month’s READ LOCAL First, we have feature poems from that forthcoming volume: “Snakeskin,” which begins with a line from a poem by Linda Hogan; and “The Possibilities,” which she describes as one of her “witcher” poems. ”Marina Gets Amnesia,” which was published on Substack in March, grew out of a friend’s question: how would Ghabash explain the world to someone who’d just woken up in the hospital with no memories at all? “Other Rooms” came out of a River Writing Collective circle in 2022, written the same day she drove to Antelope Island and was, in her words, knocked sideways by how dry the lake had become. “I had heard us Utahns were putting the lake in peril,” she says, “but it hadn’t really landed until I saw it for myself that day.”

Marina Gets Amnesia

I will start by saying that this is an impossible planet

and by that I mean, none of it should even be happening.

A place just crooked enough

for existence

We live together on a plane of change,

of alchemy underfoot and miracles above:

sun ripening into apricot,

apricot dissolving into jam,

jam transfigured into a gift,

gift softening into friendship,

friendship leaping headlong into grief,

grief simmering into song,

song devolving into dance,

dance uncorking the dawn.

You wake up.

The people in charge prefer the sound

of trumpets and their own names

to birdsong.

They will end the world to save the world themselves.

The cannibals will wait their whole lives to hear

that their fathers are proud of them.

The people in charge perform magic too:

mutating fear into greed and greed into pain and pain into their own delight.

While you slept, more files came out.

While you slept, they bombed a hundred school girls in Minab.

While you slept, they windsored their ties in the mirror

and projected strength

because an infant gasped for breath in a Texas jail.

I will help you remember magic

outside their grasp.

Consider this your starter guide

to our impossible planet:

The dead are not gone, not really

and even basic realities trick the eye.

The river shimmers, wavers,

drifts as mist and falls as crystal.

The hunger will kill you,

and will also keep you alive.

Everything is trying to tell you something.

The old want to be young.

The young want to be old.

I wish everyday that I could be different.

(And I suspect that this is normal, but not good.)

While you slept, your amaryllis bloomed three times.

While you slept, I dreamt we spoke.

Snake Skin

(After Recuerdo by Linda Hogan)

Past the place where snakes shed their skin,

there is rawness,

goosebumps,

scrapes on new scales, roughing up the diamonds.

The sun burns down on new skin just unzipped.

Even little sensations register as fires.

Soft grass suddenly matchsticks under the body.

The old world was covered in callouses, and yet

we knew how to move.

Sometimes, we even tried to pretend it was painless, and yet

the friction pulled the skin off,

sweater now itching in a warmer season.

Other Rooms

I grow concerned

that I do not really love the world.

Why have I not chained myself to a tree?

Why have I not laid down in front

of the forces of destruction?

I think of my other beloveds,

and what I would do for them:

Welcome bullets into my body

syphon their hurts and their cancers,

their brokenness into myself.

Why do I miss each small funeral,

attend other events,

stay in rooms other than the one

in which a loved one is dying?

The Possibilities

The black wings surprise me

Among my pieces, talons and a beating heart

Whatever I am is both terrifying and necessary

My body is a bad omen

Bringer of Equilibrium

I toy with the possibilities

Each one an icy onyx marble in a night-built nest

That the world will end

That I want it to end

That I was born to be the one to do it

Murderess midwife magpie mage

One of the village women who beat their chests

Kneading grief from their bodies

Like bread started in the slim hours before dawn

Like clothes brought to the river and slapped on stones

I am of those who carry lanterns

Who alight onto windowsills where someone inside is weeping

Who ensure the body is undisturbed till morning

Who bring herbs and milks and elixirs

Who reach into the dark

And pull forth something new and wild and screeching

READ LOCAL First

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