Steve Castro, Christopher Citro & Dustin Pearson

Bright Sides and Glass

I saw a cow tongue nailed to a stop sign. I find it hard to believe someone
wanted to keep the cow from confessing. Soccer balls used to be made from
cow hides. I once dreamt I played fútbol with steel-toed boots using a
human skull. The game was quite brief. I was once acquainted with a girl
who sold her soul for a living. It was said, She was cursed with good looks.
On the street where we grew up, the summer sun would bubble the tar. She'd
stop and pop these worlds with her fingernail. It was said, She's stepping
through the glass on the pavement because there's nowhere free from broken
glass. The sun one of many objects hanging above making us sweat. When
we drink water, we don't feel as if we want to eat the glass, because what is
there but ruin for glass to make inside us? If instead we lick the glass, all
the worlds coalesce. Birds, light, bugs riding wind, and the people walking
by. The shine of it. Though everyone and everything under the sun is
cooking, we’re all still raw at the end. Won’t you come, then, and see? Once
you think of another object whose broken and made forms are called the
same thing, you can leave.

Steve Castro's Conejo y Gallo was a finalist for the National Poetry Series competition (2024). He's a Costa Rican surrealist whose poetry was most recently published in 32 Poems; Image; The Spectacle and is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review; Laurel Review; Bayou Magazine. Collaborative poems co-written w/ Christopher Citro & Dustin Pearson are forthcoming in miCRo series: The Cincinnati Review.

Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). Christopher is an editorial assistant for Seneca Review and lives in Syracuse, New York.

Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2022), A Family is a House (C&R Press, 2019), and Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018). He is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Toledo where he teaches creative writing.