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The Only Star

by Jonathan Duckworth

Rolled up in my sheets,
marinating in nervous sweat,
+++++brain a flipbook:
speed-painted images, words, phrases
like ticker tape rolling on & on.

I watch the crescent moon
steadily sheathe its blade edge
in a neighbor’s chimney.
+++++Alarm clock says “4 AM.”
+++++Hypothalamus says “Fuck this.”

If I got out of bed now,
I’d be like a half-forged moth
hulled too soon from its cocoon—
stunted, wingless, crawling, soft
+++++meat for the world to devour.

++++++++++Now

dawn takes wing
+++++from its silver nest
+++++behind the eastern slash pines,
+++++plumed in slivers of
+++++misted pink glass.

+++++I do my best to hate
the sudden splendor
of this,
the only star of trillions

+++++that keeps me alive.

Top

Jonathan DuckworthJonathan Louis Duckworth is an MFA student at Florida International University and a reader for the Gulf Stream Magazine. His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction appears in or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, PANK Magazine, Thrice Fiction, Cha, Superstition Review, and elsewhere.

November 26, 2016 Avril Stewart

Antioch University Los Angeles

A literary and art journal from the MFA community at Antioch University Los Angeles.
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Friday Lunch Blog

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  • Now What?
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Spotlight: Weight / Call Me Animal

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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.

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  • Home
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      • Issue 13: Summer/Fall 2018
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