American Sonnet
most every recognizable organizing folk tune was written by a woman.
what i mean is asking me “which side are you on,” that’s florence reece, is
just as disrepectful as asking “what’s in yr pants,” that was the tsa agent,
admittedly indirect—obviously it’s “womanhood.” my grandfather couldn’t
refer to the state except as “west-by-god-virginia.” he grew up in kanawha
county, where in 2010, 1,152 workers extracted 10,412,331 pounds of
coal—that’s a little over 9,000 pounds each. my grandfather died of
colon cancer, which doesn’t mean anything. the county my grandmother
grew up in was named after lewis wetzel, who was “singularly focused
on killing indigenous americans,” several hundred in sum, but now that we
americans “no longer believe in aggressive expansionism and ethic cleansing”
says the internet, there’s nothing left i came from nothing this is my nothing
sarah garland gunning—“I am a coal miner’s wife, I’m sure I wish you well.
Let’s sink this capitalist system in the darkest pits of hell.”
jasper avery is a poet currently based in Philadelphia. her debut poetry collection, number one earth, won the 2017 Metatron Prize for Rising Authors. her poetry has appeared in ALPHA, The Puritan, and fields mag, and was shown at the Man-Made Disaster Exhibition in London in April of 2019. she tweets @saguarohugger.