Brandon Thurman
Brandon Thurman is the author of the chapbook Strange Flesh (Quarterly West, 2018). His poetry can be found in the Adroit Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nashville Review, RHINO, and others. He lives in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas with his husband and son. You can find him on Twitter @bthurman87.
Reading List
Dead Languages
My mother mutters in tongues under her breath, scraping into the trash what we couldn’t clean from our plates. In the living room, my grandmother stubs her toe & hollers out a dark angelic curse. They say ~ a language dies every two weeks. In the forest, the ornithologist sings the songs of extinct […]
Poem to My Son as Darth Vader
You kazoo your Imperial March in the backseat, your cheeks flushed with force. No, don’t be him, I say. He’s the big baddie. When you see the police lights spinning on the side of the road, you ask what the police do, ask me if bad guys are real. No, I insist. Just people who […]
Invasive Species
We knew which trees were going to die, not by the shape of their leaves, but by the purple traps that tagged their branches. My mother taught us that the emerald ash borer smuggled itself into our country in packing crates aboard foreign ships. Each Missions Sunday, she’d pierce the map’s skin with another pushpin, […]