Three Poems

Poetry by Sylvia Jones

Artwork depicting a scene in a grocery store.

"blanket in a grocery store" by Matthew Reed

GETTING PRICED OUT OF THE ZEITGEIST

We keep going to ex
queer hubs thinking god

damn this was probably really
nice in the 90s

how have we ever been
to all the places we went to?

GOOD PROPAGANDA INVOLVES REAL PEOPLE

I used to think every poet had
two heads. Mid-thought I think,
google knows me better than
my friends, who cares if people only
like you at parties. I still don’t know
what nepotism means, if gerrymandering
is like beauty. Maybe it's more akin to having a job
at the grocery store but for more money.
If god doesn’t shop for visual inspirations
or government weed. If the political winds
do or don’t shift into more salient slices of non
sentient activism, where in the sausage of
repeating decimals does that leave us?

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

during undergrad
if you never donated plasma

or sold your own blood
to go buy drugs

then perhaps you’ve
never really been poor.

Sylvia Jones

Sylvia Jones is an editor at Black Lawrence Press and works part-time as an adjunct lecturer in creative writing, she teaches at Goucher College and George Washington University. Her writing appears in DIAGRAM, Smartish Pace, the Santa Clara Review, Shenandoah, The Poetry Society of New York, The Cortland Review, Windfall Room, and other notable publications. She earned her MFA from American University in Washington D.C. and lives in Baltimore, MD.

Matthew Reed

Matthew Reed is a multi-disciplinary artist from Asheville North Carolina. Find more of his work at tvbeaches.com.