J. Scott Brownlee is the author of Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, which won the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize and 2016 Bob Bush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry. His chapbooks include Highway or Belief (2013 Button Poetry Prize), Ascension (2014 Robert Phillips Prize), and On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County (2015 Tree Light Books Prize). Born in rural Texas, he earned his MFA at New York University, where he was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow.

Catfish Heads on a Clothesline

by J. Scott Brownlee

Whoever cut them from their spines
     was a preacher, I’ll bet—or else
wanted to show off each shearing
     of maw from body flawlessly:
all these glistening ampersands

     of grief, loose string of e’s
found in et cetera, three repeated
     vowels pinned up to complicate
flesh—my obsession with it.
People on couch
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