Through the Prism of Which Discipline?
A Poem by Tonya Patrice Jordan
—for kevin
does poverty evolve? swear his obituary
is soon to be written with raps of a gavel.
a violent son in supermax, badgered by
visitor doom, listens for the other shoe.
we do stew in the mirror cauldron once
a mob emerges with a notion to take on
the character of a strongman pleased to
trample its cape in the role of headliner
for the sideshow where a convict given
his gouged-out eye for the one he stole
lies pinned to an unusual slab in a cruel
instance of being set upon by a brother
with venom in front of peers of a mind
to forget boils on a nation’s renown are
inflamed by human error or even worse
that rot of corruption which batters him
into a scapegoat saddled with notoriety
plus a flash flood of hatred at his wake.
an iron yoke corrects a daughter’s brutal
ways. her crawl toward vapor is electric.
decades of tick-tock deepen worry about
if padlocks mar the gates to her paradise.
our walls begin to close in on smashed
hopes that are best restored as a mosaic
but remain the shards used as weapons
in the crusade to avenge darlings pried
from bloodlines never dished up frosty
enough to quench the wildfire or warn
of how the earth testifies not even hell
offers up curses equal to the manifesto
a loner publishes online to justify why
she launches missiles at the passers-by
or the arguments for the correctness of
her early demise although we all know
hearts lay waste trafficking in carnage.
Tonya Patrice Jordan is a retired surgeon from New Jersey. She is the author of Knowing Sunshine, a collection of poems and one short story. Her poems can be read in The Halcyone, Amethyst Review, Linden Avenue Literary Magazine, and Peace Poems, an anthology compiled for NJ Peace Action. Tonya wrote the screenplay for a short film currently being submitted to film festivals. She is seeking a literary agent to represent her first science fiction novel.
