Endpapers
Book of life, I have read you
and memorized the lines I need.
My garage is full of skulls,
my safe is stuffed with fist-hard hearts.
Yes, I saw the signatures on your fly leaf—
a petition for my death.
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Thanksgiving
Thought thinking itself is praise
offered freely forth from itself.
Praise-wonder is kindred to
theophany, kindred to fear.
My brother, to think and to thank
share the same root: a feeling.
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To a Lost Accompaniment
From the start, the word lyric
described music no longer heard,
text and sound long sundered,
a reminder of something gone.
What is it, then, this silent harmony,
this sense of known unknowing?
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Joshua McKinney’s fifth book of poetry, Sad Animal (2024), won the inaugural John Ridland Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. His other awards include The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He is co-editor of the online ecopoetics journal, Clade Song.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 