Dionne Custer Edwards

Disruption

First you introduce gladiators to blossoms
then regret it. You cannot take back welts.

Imagine all the interruptions.
The way a conversation goes awry.

The color of the river changed after carp. A single spawn
managed to unravel the stitches,
one flesh,
fish,
fowl,
at a time.

Control, a worry cloth, full in a hole, folds
and hosts a foe, a colony adrift.

Ohio, no stranger to abolition, holds its scars close.

Sweeps the river of small and strange skin.
Sins. If you can call an open mouth a fault.

Dionne Custer Edwards is a writer, educator, and the Director of Learning & Public Practice at the Wexner Center for the Arts. She also founded the award-winning art and writing program Pages. Dionne has published critical and literary writing, internationally and nationally in Sanat Dünyamiz (“Our Art World”), Turkey; Journal GEARTE, Brazil; and in the University of Arizona’s Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education. Her literary work has appeared in 3Elements Review, Barren Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Flock, Gordon Square Review, Grist, Porter House Review, Storm Cellar, The Seventh Wave, Tahoma Literary Review, and others. Dionne is co-editor of a book series, forthcoming, to be published by Ohio State University Press, On Possibility: Social Change and the Arts + Humanities.