If only an __X__ distracted by arrangement, if only my
eyelashes singed clean by work, arrangement, this like no
one remembers training regression. It’s hard to see my
own complicity, so I don’t usually. I just walk around.
Heated enough, rearranging love and money, which is
never one thing and there is always too much of it
somewhere else, and even so. Cheap. I am learning what
it is to have friends, and to stay in when it’s hot, and to go
to a dark bar when it’s hot, and to stay in the cities I’ve
chosen to live. When I said money, I meant work, the
products of which, got it. Languages condensed back to
symbol and then expanded to give proper warning as
interactive. An accurate prediction of rain. A symbol for a
flower, which is a symbol for an entry. A landscape of
enormous thorns, jagged and menacing, so the danger
rumbles impenetrably even if its niceties are not
understood. Ten thousand future years of landscape
designed to terrify on purpose, regression. I do my small
part. I contribute.
Originally from the Hudson Valley in New York, Thea Brown is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Recent poems can be found in Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Oversound, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook We Are Fantastic (Petri Press 2013) and the full-length collection Think of the Danger (H_NGM_N 2016). She lives in Baltimore, where she was the 2016–2017 Tickner Fellow at the Gilman School, a 2016 Rubys Artist Project Grant awardee, and the recipient of a 2017 UCross Foundation fellowship.