I See the Blind Flashing in the morning light, knowing change is but a coin tossed in the air, neither heads nor tails, cement-kissed cheek unable to turn (keeping still) lest I wake the sleeping ones. Cuffed up for being of color, of consequence. Feeling weight, long dead, of a grandmother’s song: On Sundays, I see the blind. When they…
He gave them too much of not enough, So they brought an empty birthday card And lay it against his wet headstone. Jason M. Thornberry’s writing appears in JMWW, Los Angeles Review of Books, North Dakota Quarterly, Harbor Review, Entropy, TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. Assaulted by strangers, he suffered a traumatic brain injury. Relearning to…
Death is a dress never worn, waiting in our closets linen or wool we can die in any season a dress too important to wear, pushed into a dusty corner of occasion dresses bridesmaid dresses don’t fit dresses sale dresses dresses the moths got dresses bought in bad light drunk dresses pooled on the floor worn out dresses worried dresses…
HOW TO MEDITATE drift your skull to lilacs crest your brow with pineapple sage dream rose into your nostrils wake crying butterfly pea and cornflower fill your lungs herbaceous inhale parsley exhale mint rinse your hair with rice water let the dark of your insides deepen plum and charcoal where light won’t reach fade your bruises with buttercup whiten your…
I’m tired how murder follows us how we’re an all too accessible play area for anger’s russian roulette merry go round and how this, patronizing, cautionary life of smiles and apathy for our death waits freer than we ever were sweeping us vagrantly in riptides complacency in a glass of tap water poison in flint from slave patrol city minders…
We go together like loofah and linen— compostable, antimicrobial— soil cake in the gut house, nice parasites with stylet quips, sealing lips from disease. Mutuals suggest we left our dust to mingle— skin cells, hair shed— without banter laughter balm, and yogic twister lip calms. Or maybe you’re the night sun and I’m the fun jungle, mistaking fungal for lunar—…
Kianna Greene Raised simultaneously between Atlanta and Columbus, Georgia, Kianna Greene is a poet and writer living in Orlando, Florida where she is an MFA Poetry Candidate at the University of Central Florida. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House and Ruminate Magazine. Kianna is an alumna of The Kenyon Review‘s Writers Workshop and currently serves as Associate Poetry Editor…
Sugar Hexany We’re already on dangerous ground — your voice does to me what music does ; is what I mean when I describe spending time with you … is spending time with the world , levántame baby in that which shimmers . How walking through grass cleanses the feet — the art that occurred in a vacuum ; minced…
Mr. B When I asked Mr. B about solar wind, he said there was no such thing, in front of the whole class. I was pretty sure he was wrong, and he was: solar wind is a stream of charged particles, mostly protons, released from the upper atmosphere of the sun and permeating the whole solar system. You can harness…
Sink into your parents’ plastic pool, painted mosaics on polypropylene liner, PVC flamingo floats, neon orange rafts turn your skin whiter (exsanguinate eyelids, cheekbones keen), cherry stone freckles sit– mistaken unsinkable seeds. For all of the Sylvias shivering away ventricle remnants of nostrum– (remember when you went around the world?) please don’t end here. Come out from under– water,…