ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Tiffany L. Thomas is a poet from lower Alabama, living and studying in Alaska's interior. Her recent poetry can be found at Menacing Hedge, Limehawk Press, and Watershed Review. She is a recipient of the Richard S. Lynch Poetry Award and the Catholic Poetry Society Award.
Our Father | Jack Brown
I am staring at the white acrylic table when I hear my grandmother tell her sister Jack Brown would have killed that man and I wonder. Where does Jack Brown begin and my ([great]grand) father, their father, (a daddy) end. And I think now I heard something about a river, someone in a river, something happening to someone in a river. Jack Brown would have killed that man (in [the] a river). There's only one picture of Jack Brown, like Jack Sprat like Jack jumping like Jack climbing like Jack running, a lean man with gutted out candle eyes, it sits on top of the piano. A white-haired man standing, staring, and my tiny white haired grandmother, sitting closer to the scales, and the fish rots from the head and Jack Brown waits in the river. Jack, would steal a life, Brown, tanning that man's hide. I wonder to my sister if not my father, our father (daddy) could have killed a man, but if Paul Thomas, like pall like to miss like doubting, would have killed that man. Who is that man. I wonder. A dead giant looming between two sisters, waiting to have been killed.
When I write I am always thinking of the things I can't get away from; desired or not, all of my poetry exists within arm's reach. So in recent poetry, and "Our Father" in particular, I'm trying to navigating the ways families fail to mend transgenerational wounds and the ways cultural scripts enforce traditions of silence. I'm trying to transcribe the voices of the ghosts that kind of silence births. Poems, like prayers and like secrets, are as much about the things that are said as they are the things that aren't.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
