Madison Jones, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Global Impact
I am an asteroid with legs.
My Janus mask dissolves
as I scorch the atmosphere
and leave footprints everywhere.
My Janus mask dissolves
beneath my cretaceous boot.
I leave footprints everywhere
and plant my annihilation foot.
With cretaceous boot held high,
I plant my annihilation foot.
My treads are geological,
my hair is burning dust.
I plant my annihilation foot
as I scorch the atmosphere,
my hair is burning dust,
I am an asteroid with legs.
After the Fire
We came to the end of the path
that once led to wooden steps
where we would sit in the afternoon,
our feet hanging from the stoop
which now stops and gestures
upward toward nothingness or eternity,
pieces of stone the crane truck left
behind as it carried fistfuls
of the cabin where we spent
so many college days like coins
dropped into a deep well. Shards
of glass reflect the late noon,
casting reflections forward
and away that make the grass
look as it did those evenings
we built fires in the yard,
yellow beacons to marshal
in the late nights by the riverside.
We would paddle out
into the trance of dark water,
hull pressing against the current
the way that time pushes us onward,
or else we would be swept up
by the spillway’s gentle rhetoric
and tossed into the rapids below,
and later, drifting back to the dock,
as if homeward from the past
to find the embers smoldering
in the new moon darkness.
Madison Jones is an assistant professor of Writing & Rhetoric and Natural Resources Science at the University of Rhode Island. He received his Ph.D. in Writing Studies from the University of Florida in May 2020. He is author of the poetry collections Losing the Dog (Salmon Poetry, 2023) and Reflections on the Dark Water (Solomon & George, 2016). He has published over fifty poems in journals such as The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere.
Find out more at madisonpjones.com or follow him on Twitter @poetrhetor.