Yellow Mama E zine

number 29, 1950, second attempt

 

by John Sweet

 

 

these things seen
through sheets of glass
are almost real

think of history

understand that i would
place you against the
flawless blue sky and call you
beautiful

would pick at the same small wound
for thirty-eight years until it
came to define me

and i have spent my life
among men who claim to have found
god in a bottle

i have tasted
my father's ashes

will spend the rest of my life
hurting the people i love
and calling it art

all i ask is
that i be forgiven

 

 

       John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate NY. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in compassionate nihilism which, as luck would have it, has all the best bands. His published collections include No One Starves in a Nation of Corpses (2020 Analog Submission Press) and There’s Only One Way This Is Going to End (Cyberwit, 2023).

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     Image Credit: A nearly empty whiskey glass with ice rests under bar light in a Knoxville, Tennessee bar & grill, when I was unwittingly practicing my own art of hurting. Depression never cares. It’s like this glass full of warm colors but is cold as ice. Photograph by John C. Mannone (2018).

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     John C. Mannone is a scientist, poet, CNF essayist, fiction writer, and poetry editor who creates derivative visual art and photo art for speculative poems in Abyss & Apex, Silver Blade (on hiatus), and ADR Poetry (defunct). His photography/art appears or is forthcoming on the anthology cover of the 2026 Tennessee Voices and inside Chattanooga Writers Guild anthologies. He currently serves on the artists staff of Yellow Mama Literary Magazine. His literary work appears widely in Artemis, Critical Humanities, The New England Journal of Medicine, and others. He’s the Poet Laureate for the City of Oak Ridge, TN (2026-2028).