Jonterri Gadson’s chapbook Interruptions is part of our microseries. It contains three poems—two short poems, one an excerpt from a long poem—which walk the tenuous line between safety and danger. The excerpt from the long poem, “Everything Else Requires My Approval”, is stunning in its despair and its sense of the imminence of danger in the speaker’s son’s life; it is also stunning in its ferocity and love, in the speaker’s desire to protect that son. Here are a few lines.
and then I will take in too much air or not enough of it too much then not enough of it / not enough and then too much like drowning me taking and taking and giving / too much of it away while my mother listens and this world without my son in it / forms itself around her. If he ever goes thro… how dare the air join us here in this new world / where there is room for nothing but air and his absence his absence and the cruelty of air / to move through him then stop
You can find out more about Jonterri on her author page, and pre-order the chapbook here.