Volume 71, Number 1 · Fall 2021
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Man with Shotgun and Alien

Sylvia Jones

after Noah Davis’s Man with Shotgun and Alien, oil and acrylic on canvas

selling two-minute clocks, high above
an out of focus past, invisible from the street,
my first decapitation was a sweetheart
in the backseat hereafter of a good pollen-covered car

glass-arched, under the whirring ceiling fan, pounding
mornings in the floor with my moonroof forehead
the more cars they make, the more people die
all it takes is a half-inch of another moment’s thigh

sometimes it’s good to be afraid of the future
it’s the year of that feeling
everyone has when they’re dancing
and I’m not lonely cause I’m friends

with my neighbors, and my childhood home
is an airbnb is a brothel
of vacationing millennials and hallelujah
money, it’s the bootstrap trick mirror, waiting
with bated breath; I lost my face or the face I had

when you’re inside the bank everyone knows you’re robbing it
the more cars they make the more people die
when was the last time we had fun?

Sylvia Jones is a writer, editor, and prison abolitionist. At the moment, she serves as a 2021-22 Stadler Fellow. She works as an associate editor for West Branch and as a poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press. She also intermittently reads for Ploughshares. Her writing appears in DIAGRAM, Poet Lore, the Hopkins Review, the Santa Clara Review, Shenandoah, Revolute, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from American University in Washington D.C. and has received support from the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts; PEN America; Topical Cream; Poets at the End of the World; Literary Cleveland; The Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Community Center of New York; and the Maryland State Arts Council. She lives in Baltimore with her partner Agata and their buff tabby, Theo.