You are memory. Unstable, volatile, vaporous. I spread clay across your skin until you exist in solid form—a monument. Before this clay dries, I locate a place, a corner perhaps, to create a small opening, an aperture allowing your escape back into the coursing pulsing teeming world. But I retain the shape of your existence to remind me you were real.
Jason M. Thornberry’s poetry, fiction, and essays appear in The Los Angeles Review of Books, JMWW, TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Entropy, Rejection Letters, North Dakota Quarterly, Letters Journal, and elsewhere. In 1999, Jason was assaulted by strangers, overcoming a traumatic brain injury. Relearning to walk and speak, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University. Jason lives in Seattle with his wife and dog. He is finishing his first novel.
