Glassworks
  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • current issue
    • read Issue 26
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2023
    • interview with Raina J. Leon
    • interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • award nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • newsletter
  • home
  • about
    • history
    • staff bios
    • community outreach
    • affiliations
    • contact
  • current issue
    • read Issue 26
    • letter from the editor
    • looking glass spring 2023
    • interview with Raina J. Leon
    • interview with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
  • submit
    • submission guidelines
  • looking glass
    • through the looking glass
  • editorial content
    • book reviews
    • opinion
    • interviews
  • flash glass
    • flash glass 2023
    • flash glass 2022
    • flash glass 2021
    • flash glass 2020
    • flash glass 2019
    • flash glass 2018
    • flash glass 2017
    • flash glass 2016
    • flash glass 2015
  • media
    • art
    • audio
    • video
  • archive
    • award nominees
    • read and order back issues
  • Master of Arts in Writing program
    • about Writing Arts at Rowan University
    • application and requirements
  • newsletter
Glassworks

Untitled 2 (Namwick)

​
by Jason B. Crawford

In response to the act of a nigga saying nigga to a nigga:

Son, I am the stone carving you will always find cut in the middle of your throat / You can cough and hack and swallow trying to loosen me out but I have grappled every ounce of your esophagus; I will die here / Don’t bother giving me a funeral because I’ve been dead before / I know of ones made of the mouths you speak so violently / How dare you call me something you can’t hold, rough air stitched in unprocessed cotton / There’s not enough saffron and water to coat a baby ragged / And to give it new flesh would be a disservice to its mother, the fever tree, rooted, hoping to not find another of her children left a funny jaundice thing / But you use this history like a toy / You like to play with me around your tongue until you think it’s time to spit out / Yet I am the aftertaste, a smooth set of spikes digging into the palate / Tell me child, does your mother know ghosts see you as an offering to make white / To tear the flesh until it is only the meat left unseasoned / More and more I’m finding your voice to sound like a snow storm / That is to say I hear the white when you call my name / A murder of crows flocking from the windpipe when you speak me up / It will crawl itself into a noose and wait for someone to push on the other side, stay left hanging from a tree like a burning flag’s wet dream / Like a country built on the bones of a ship filled with fingers / Or a bone ship full of fingers not ready to build a country

Jason B. Crawford is black, bi-poly-queer, and a damn force of nature. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as High Shelf Press, Wellington Street Review, Poached Hare, The Amistad, Royal Rose, and Kissing Dynamite, he is the Chief Editor for The Knight’s Library. His chapbook collection Summertime Fine was a Short List selection for Nightingale & Gale and won the 2020 Varient Literature chapbook contest. Jason is also the recurring host poet for Ann Arbor Pride.

A 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, Jason's poem can be found in Issue 20 of Glassworks.

Picture

glassworks is a publication of
​Rowan University's Master of Arts in Writing
260 Victoria Street • Glassboro, New Jersey 08028 
glassworksmagazine@rowan.edu
​All Content on this Site (c) 2023 glassworks