Burton, Joshua: Fracture Anthology

Ethel (chapbook)

2022//limited edition 100 copies
Comes with a QR code for Audio Book version.

JOSHUA BURTON is a poet and educator from Houston, TX and received his MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. He is a 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar, 2019 Juniper Summer Writing Institute scholarship winner, 2019 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics fellowship finalist, received the Honorable Mention for the 2018 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and was a 2020 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing finalist. His work can be found in Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Conduit, TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, Grist, and Indiana Review. His debut poetry collection is forthcoming in the spring of 2023 with the University of Wisconsin Press.

from Fracture Anthology

Heard

 I.

 when writing in my mother’s voice: two pulls earthing us

away from one another. 

the horses attached to a single body, each limb

pulled away— seeing through to her

through

a muggy decanter. I can never truly capture her voice, yet, 

in writing her here

 my hope 

 is to let lyric light through her

 like a myth through family. I cannot touch her voice—

 the jar of salt in my hands.

 
II.

 a man sings his story in voice of a woman, his mother.

 am I silencing her voice,                 closing in

 on myself, skeletal as I am from the start? I believe the light

 that guides these words comes from care.

 but there’s a difference between picking up broken glass

 and knowing what to do with it.