I’ll Write You Letters

by Jonathan Duckworth

On birch bark,
with chicken bone shards
dipped in a pot of moth wing dust:
an ink only visible near bioluminescent seaweed.
I’ll roll and slip them into glass capsules
and load these onto hummingbirds’ backs.
You’ll know my words have reached you
when the wingbeats fill your ears,
and you’ll learn that love
sounds a lot like a lawnmower.

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Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an MFA student at Florida International University, where he serves as a reader and copy-editor for the Gulf Stream Magazine. His fiction and poetry appears in or is forthcoming in Literary Orphans, Fourteen Hills, Sliver of Stone, decomP, Cha, The Penny Dreadful, Off the Coast, Gravel, and elsewhere.

Word from the Editor

Our stories can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell. In her essay “Alone in Company,” Chelsea Bayouth reflects on the role of an artist at the end of 2018: “For me, it is to fear that every word or image is a window into public, political, and social tumult. It means you have to be more vulnerable than you or anyone in times previous has ever been.” If we continue to write, to paint, to dance, to show up for ourselves and our art every day, we might find that our work transcends ambiguity and discomfort to reveal a greater insight into ourselves, and if we are lucky, into the world.