By: Kathleen Bryson

So weary of poems
about oysters and eggs
and bone, and pearls,
with delicate allusions to
memento mori and organza
with Victorian references and forced rhymes
with frail loose endings
to stanzas
So tired of words
used in poems
like coiled and sweet
and violet and dry
so bored with verses
on diets that never
span wide
and always
give you a serious
case of vertical
and irked by
the lack of full stops
and by lowercase
diminutive cuties
and ambivalent
word-hyphens
in the maybe-middle
of poems
that run colorsconcepts
all together,
the eggy pearls of wisdom
just tiny bones
within the shells, uncrisped,
unscrambled, unfried
their frilly whites and yolks
still calcified,
still sweetfrozen
and jellybean-frail,
the dainty bumps of Braille,
so doll-like, stiff, so pale,
that never make
strong declarations,
as if they’re not allowed,
as if afraid of
being thought
too loud.

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Alaskan-born Kathleen Bryson received her Ph.D. in Evolutionary Anthropology from University College London. She studies prejudice/empathy and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at University of Oxford. Her most recent novel is the experimental The Stagtress, published by Fugue State Press (2019). Her poems have been published in Magma, Eunoia Review and the Bombay Literary Magazine, amongst many others.