Latent — Blackbird Archive

← v14n2, Fall 2015

When my friend abandons Norway for south Thailand his voice

comes lighter through the screen telling me to visit while a half

the distance of his life from mine until his girlfriend perches on

the armchair with such perfect balance staring at my face: I think

you could be very pretty.But there’s no money and no money

and my wife returns to bed so bright one morning, her softness

waking me, the piss test positive. And just as well. By then

my friend has moved, his girlfriend gone, violence increasing

throughout his province: Last week they fished a girl like you

out of the canal, such a waste. And more to say before bird cries

become screeches through his open window as rain comes on fast

filling our screens with static, our connection lost to stillness

in this single room, my small apartment between bar alleys, all those

cut-throughs pitted and uneven and too often spotted in the night

with women going out alone or drunk and coming loudly home or

women shoved and coming up against one stone wall or another.

gender identity displacement

Jordan Rice

Jordan Rice is the author of the forthcoming Constellarium (Orison Books, 2016) and is coeditor of the anthology Voices of Transgender Parents (Transgress Press, 2015). Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Colorado Review , The Feminist Wire , Mid-American Review ,and Mississippi Review , among others. Her poetry has been selected for the 2010 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the 2010 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize from Crab Orchard Review , the 2008 Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the 2008 Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry from Harpur Palate . She earned a PhD from Western Michigan University, where she served as associate editor for New Issues Poetry & Prose and as an assistant poetry editor for Third Coast . She earned an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Rice is an executive section editor for Dublin Poetry Review.