ISSUE 45 

FE Magazine Series #4 // Fonograf Editions collaboration

Peach Woman is a serial poem that calls back to a figure that could have been me. Writing this, I was obsessed with the idea that memory isn't like a filing cabinet or database, but instead like taking a copy of a copy, each time losing fidelity. I wanted to rewrite the past, edit the copies. I also wondered how desire impacts the past. I remember past fantasies as vividly as the memories. I believe too that when you're a body in hiding some of the sweetest memories are those spent in your imagination. Peach Woman is my insistence that I can write what I want and have her become less shadow as she is read and thought of, living in the heads of the thinkers. This recitation was filmed by my partner Noelle Mrugała-Paraan next to my Grandmother's Draceana Fragrans, which has bloomed for the first time in 20 years.

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Emily Hunerwadel is the author of the chapbook Professional Crybaby, selected by Kyle Dargan for the Poetry Society of America’s 2017 Chapbook Fellowship. Their second chapbook, Peach Woman, will be published in June 2022 by Doublecross Press. They won Columbia Journal’s 2019 Fall Poetry Contest, judged by Monica Sok, and their work has been featured by the Academy of American Poets, Bustle, Fonograf Editions, the Vassar Review, Quarterly West, Burrow Press, The Pinch Journal, Hold: A Journal, Dream Pop Journal, Hot Pink and Windfall Room, among others. Hunerwadel holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Born and raised in the deep south, they work as a book designer and writer in Western Massachusetts.