• Submit to Five South

  • Submissions are open for flash, poetry, long fiction, and non-fiction. Read our submission guidelines.

  • Recently Published

    • Our Theseus by Nathan Jefferson
      Last week he was a dishwasher who his coworkers called Ricky. Today he’s a day laborer named Eddie, clearing a pair of fallen trees off a new build’s lawn and fixing up a large garden. Rotting plank ripped out, new plank inserted.
    • Robbing the Pillars by Marie Goyette
      Ruth stood on the narrow iron bridge, gripping her father’s obsidian necklace, and wondered how many years it would take before the river wore them both down to nothing.
    • Roll for Love by Cidney Mayes
      She holds the dice up to me. “For good luck?”
    • The Call by Eben E. B. Bein
      I hungered into that quiet until— there—unbelievable!— a wolf spider scuttled onto a leaf.
    • Saturation by Claire Oleson
      I no longer harangue every desk nurse at every hospital for a taxonomic breakdown of her bills. I don’t ask for the numbers of the Benadryl, the water cups, the abdominal touches done with gloved hands. I am the most American I’ve ever been—she costs what she costs and I eat it.

An Etymology of Loss by Terri Linn Davis

March 14, 2022
Reading Time: 1 Minutes
Loss—

is a hungry word

opening up its mouth

wide enough to fit a

gold ring, a child’s

casket. A language,

this is the noun of measures:

see, deprivation—

and the weighted stone

of empty.

Imagine, now, its root

word’s meaning:

to loosen, divide, cut apart.

What is loss but a slipped grip,

but a shelter swept away,

but a satiated Lynx

beside a dog’s collar?

See, also, miscarriage

(the vessel unloading

goods not meant for you).


Share

Poetry

Davis, Terri Linn
Terri Linn Davis has an MFA in poetry from Southern Connecticut State University where she adjuncts and teaches writing composition and poetry. She is the recipient of the Jack and Annie Smith Poets and Painters Award (2018) and attended the 2022 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for poetry. Her poems have most recently appeared in Flypaper Lit, The Daily Drunk Mag, Five South, West Trestle Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Ghost City Review and elsewhere. She is co-editor of Icebreakers Lit, a journal featuring collaborative writing, and is the host of the podcast Too Lit to Quit: the Podcast for Literary Writers. She lives in Connecticut with her co-habby and their three children. You can find her on Twitter @TerriLinnDavis and on her website www.terrilinndavis.com.

Read More by Davis, Terri Linn:


You might also like

Caught by Chris Bullard
November 19, 2024
Second Winter Solstice During an Epidemic by Marianne Worthington
September 26, 2024
Beautiful Generative Machine by David Fowler
September 17, 2024