ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Patrick Tong is a high school senior from the northern suburbs of Chicago. A "Best of Issue" winner for the National Poetry Quarterly, he has also been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom. His work appears or is forthcoming in After the Pause, 3Elements Review, and Rising Phoenix Review, among others. He currently serves as both an Executive Editor and Poetry Managing Editor for Polyphony Lit, a copy editor for its affiliated blog, Voices, a poetry reader for Counterclock Journal, and the Outreach Director for the Counterclock Arts Collective.
Also by Patrick Tong:
Chaos Theory
Family Tree
Osteology of Martyrdom
Each night I dream of revolution in the worst way —
a skull collapsed on the asphalt, a slit throat &
its silenced catharsis. Come morning, mercenaries skin
sidewalks with torches & steal a month’s worth of
crops, my family’s field thinning like our ribcages. Lampposts
light scars on sternums; knuckles stutter open, as if
to hold something cruder than a soldier’s knife. Mandibles,
shoulder blades, paling towards their death —
murders that wear every name I was clove from. At noon, the
whips come clean over my collarbone. Equal fractions
of this violence. War stories, told and retold into the dawn.
After the spear sputters through my brother’s chest,
the sky makes a borrowing from his body. Bone after bone
slackened into smoke, limbs singe into soot my children
tread across. Blood lines spidering down my forearms, an acrid
death my single birthright. Machete-dug lesions reopen
until there is no more euphemism for our misfire. Until there
is only the gold of freedom taunting the dark &
my kneecaps tumbling to the ground like a flag.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
