“The Question” by J. Lipson

Josh Lipson is a poet, historian, and psychologist, based in New York. His work has been featured in venues including Homonym Journal, Burning House Press, Petrichor, KGB Bar Lit, and The SHARKPACK Annual. His poem “Habana-Om” was nominated in 2019 for Sundress Publications’ “Best of the Net Anthology”.

J. Lipson has work featured in the recent issue of In Parentheses Literary Magazine (Winter 2025)

The Question

Is simplicity a fool’s errand?
Wind-born locus of intensive computation
Double-bound sovereign of a thousand square feet
Metropolis of gaslamps blaring from a bluff above
the squall-torn bay
Scylla of fourscore Charybdi and Charybdis of
numberless Pelasgians
Representation at the head of all representations,
idée fixe whose tendrils poke through every
Brodmann area, and on occasion
it’s the same by you:
I am being hallucinated by dozens of flashbulb
entities at any given moment
I am the paradox as much if not more
than anything I’ve ever made an object
I am the puddle of mud at the foot of the
bridge

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.

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