Three Poems
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 (b. 1994) is the author of Television Fathers (Meekling Press, 2024). She serves as poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press and is a senior reader for the journal Ploughshares. Her writing can be found in Smartish Pace, American Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, Shenandoah, The Hopkins Review, Common Place Poetics, Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, Strange Hymnal, R&R, Mountaineers Books, and elsewhere. Jones lives and writes in Baltimore, Maryland, with her partner, writer and translator Agata Ambrozewicz, and their buff tabby cat, Theo.
Matthew Reed
Matthew Reed is a multi-disciplinary artist from Asheville North Carolina. Find more of his work at tvbeaches.com.