A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Two poems by Madison Jones

Madison Jones, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

 

Global Impact

 

I am an asteroid with legs.

My Janus mask dissolves

as I scorch the atmosphere

and leave footprints everywhere.

 

My Janus mask dissolves

beneath my cretaceous boot.

I leave footprints everywhere

and plant my annihilation foot. 

 

With cretaceous boot held high,

I plant my annihilation foot.

My treads are geological,

my hair is burning dust.

 

I plant my annihilation foot

as I scorch the atmosphere,

my hair is burning dust,

I am an asteroid with legs.

After the Fire

We came to the end of the path

that once led to wooden steps

where we would sit in the afternoon,

our feet hanging from the stoop

which now stops and gestures 

upward toward nothingness or eternity, 

pieces of stone the crane truck left

behind as it carried fistfuls

of the cabin where we spent 

so many college days like coins

dropped into a deep well. Shards 

of glass reflect the late noon,

casting reflections forward 

and away that make the grass

look as it did those evenings

we built fires in the yard,

yellow beacons to marshal

in the late nights by the riverside.

We would paddle out

into the trance of dark water,

hull pressing against the current

the way that time pushes us onward,

or else we would be swept up

by the spillway’s gentle rhetoric

and tossed into the rapids below,

and later, drifting back to the dock,

as if homeward from the past

to find the embers smoldering

in the new moon darkness.

 

Madison Jones is an assistant professor of Writing & Rhetoric and Natural Resources Science at the University of Rhode Island. He received his Ph.D. in Writing Studies from the University of Florida in May 2020. He is author of the poetry collections Losing the Dog (Salmon Poetry, 2023) and Reflections on the Dark Water (Solomon & George, 2016). He has published over fifty poems in journals such as The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. 

Find out more at madisonpjones.com or follow him on Twitter @poetrhetor.

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