Altivolant

Jordan Keller-Martinez

Muzzle flash paths a bullet through pith to pit, brain halved. In his hometown,in a field, in brush with the scent of deer, surrounded by azaleas, we found him and sleptnext to him. In moonlight we clutch his corpse. Get the birds. Get us in a grovewith nightjars to take him elsewhere, where no one else will see. Rename us: has-beens.Protriptyline talked him out of his body. We search the gutfuls of dirt 
between usand find an animal in amber. A pill. A casing. His bullet-brawn. Not him. His closedcasket closes our eyes to what he’d done to his body. We each havetwo eyes toward the past, which turns away. Swing that worlddead ahead. Insomnia waits for us: wants to dream.

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Jordan Keller-Martinez is a US Army Veteran and holds the Junior Fellowship in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his MFA. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Guesthouse, and elsewhere.

December 2020

Chicago, Illinois

Editor
Adrian Matejka

Creative Director and Exhibitions Co-curator
Fred Sasaki

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Lindsay Garbutt

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Holly Amos

Associate Editor
Angela Flores

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