Untitled American Sonnets
2026 Broad Ripple Review Prize Winner in Poetry
My grief counselor pounded the arms of his desk chair
so hard he replaced them twice in two months. He tells me,
You can’t save anyone, son, & God, how I want to believe.
Dear Heavenly Father, didst thou sculpt us in the dark?
What does one call one half of a duet? Of what use
is a lone ski, barreling down black diamonds?
I can rip this paddle so hard I tear the river & still,
I’ll drift in circles. It’s autumn in Los Angeles &
soldiers are zip-tying kids’ wrists. My Gazan friend Amani
buried two sons in the rubble from his house.
Drones shatter windows across soot-stained Kyiv &
here we are sobbing in Walmart. What I’m trying to tell you is
I’m so sorry I saw the darkness & was too afraid to name it.
Now I know why God won’t let me die.
The scatter tube is waxed cardboard covered in
snow-capped mountains. Maybe the same Cascades
we trekked as kids, our bags as tall as us. The top twists open
to reveal a perforated tab for dispersal. He’s heavy, awkward,
sounds like sand. I hand him to my living siblings
& when my mother isn’t ready, take him into my room.
Odd: the first and final times I’ve held my brother in my arms,
he’s weighed about the same. I’m convulsing at my bedside
as the tube stares blankly back alongside a Hydro Flask,
Mentos gum, Wellbutrin. When the glaciers
finish melting & wildfires eat the trees, when the skies
give way to ashen rain & the waters wallow soot, a moose
will raise his head & moan through ravaged pine groves. & you
with your supplications. Aren't you fucking listening?
They put them inside river-bound
barrels, on northern sides of cemeteries,
under rubble. They dragged them
behind horses & struck their names
off every deed & plaque. They
lopped off their offending hands, thrust
stakes through their hearts, hid them deep
in woodland gloom. They tried to forget.
I will not forget. I am starting to believe
hell isn’t fire, but fraught absence & sorrow
is a dirty dog & grief is ancient glitter. I have looked
inside my veins & found nothing but tilled compost.
O Death: have I learned why your sickle weeps?
Was all this mourning late love all along?
About the Author
Jackson Burgess is the author of "Atrophy" (Write Bloody Publishing, 2018) and the chapbook "Pocket Full of Glass" (Tebot Bach, 2017). A poetry/fiction dual-admit to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has placed work in Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Tin House, Joyland, and elsewhere.