Jessika Morrison is a current creative writing graduate student at California State University, Sacramento. Her work involves questioning her Mexican-Greek heritage and everyday life. Her work has appeared in Havik, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. As a native of Sacramento, she enjoys outdoor activities such as hiking, biking, and rafting.
Particuate Matter
The gray snowflake ash falls all around.
permeates lungs and sky and air and grass
We know this isn’t the last time it will all burn down.
Less water each season turns grass green to brown
Igniting faster with our greed to harvest coal gas.
The gray snowflake ash falls all around.
Fires scream through fields and eat up the town,
entire cities and flocks of birds evacuating en masse,
We know this isn’t the last time it will all burn down.
Smoke chokes out the sun and retardant rains down
How many acres of destruction can a fire amass?
The gray snowflake ash falls all around.
A scrape in the earth, a charred and scarred wound,
a paradise once was – fire doesn’t discriminate by class
We know this isn’t the last time it will all burn down.
Nature’s cries fall around us without a sound,
Climate change talks feels like we’re at an impasse.
The gray snowflake ash falls all around.
We know this isn’t the last time it will all burn down.
From the Editor:
We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.
Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?
The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.
To view the types of work we typically publish, preview or purchase our past issues.
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7
32 pages, published 1/15/2022
By In Parentheses in Volume 6
80 pages, published 10/15/2020
in parentheses 
enter the discussion: