Jason B. Crawford
Image by Katrin Hauf from Unsplash
Jason B. Crawford (They/He/She) is a writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. Their debut full-length Year of the Unicorn Kidz is out from Sundress Publications. Crawford holds a Bachelor of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University. They are a 2023 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices fellow. They are the winner of the Courtney Valentine Prize for Outstanding Work by a Millennial Artist, the winner of the Rhino’s Founders Prize, and a finalist for the Frontier’s Open prize. Crawford was a finalist for the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid 2021 and 2022 Poetry Contest. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, AGNI Magazine, Foglifter Magazine, RHINO Poetry, Four Way Review, Cincinnati Review, Frontier Magazine, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. They hold an MFA in poetry from The New School.
Untitled 1975-86
The sky is filling with smoke
from a neighboring country. All of the buildings
are smudged in orange. For some reason
I have started to understand the language
of this smoke. Sometimes the fog is looking
to be held just as we are; in this moment
it cradles between our lungs, our unholy
child of grief created in an absence of a storm. I, too, am
the aftermath of burning. The world
is turning a sepia hue and all of our photos will
be gorgeous. I am not equipped for another
apocalypse. Please tell me everything
is still beautiful. The moon looks like a god
dropped a peach in the sky and left it to rot. It is that
kind of beautiful. Don’t question how
much fire it took to get here, just enjoy this
sunset that now will never end.
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