Jarred Thompson
Numbers
They’ll be printed on a page, scribbled down margins, confirming your deepest fears.
With every extra zero and every digit that countdowns
To withered hands and skeleton faces
Unreal results, faces that rush you from
Room to
Room:
Rows of smiling teeth shaking hands two by two.
A thousand miles away I watch it all unfold and unfurl in my hand:
a gigantic single turd, a nauseating smell
of a hospital floor that I cannot get up from.
Hold the three bottles to your chest,
little capsules that hold countless mornings.
Tomorrow I become something different
counting down the numbers, always the numbers,
that never lie,
only multiply and multiply
Jarred Thompson‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, Type House Literary Magazine, Outcast Magazine, the Esthetic Apostle, Sky Island Journal, Cosmographia Books, Best New African Poets Anthology of 2016, and New Contrast Literary Journal. His chapbook Universes and Paradoxes was shortlisted for the Kingdom in the Wild Poetry Prize. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, New Contrast Literary Journal (forthcoming 2018), The Rainy Day Literary Magazine, ImageOutWrite, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Transcending the Flame: The Writivism Mentoring Anthology (Black Letter Media, 2018).
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