in parentheses

“Diamond Sea” by J. M. Thornberry

Jason M. Thornberry’s work appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Soundings East, Harbor Review, The Antonym, TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Broadkill Review, and elsewhere. His work examines family, disability, and social justice. Jason holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University.

“Diamond Sea” is a prose poetry piece which first appeared in the Dillydoun Review in 2021. This journal is now offline.

Diamond Sea

Upon the sand I stood and watched the water rushing past, scuffing itself over the rocks, racing toward a distant diamond sea. Then I kneeled and opened the box at my feet, removing relics I hadn’t seen in years. Dropping them, watching the current drag them away. A conveyor belt of tumbling mementos: the box of letters, the unfinished photo album, the pages of your handwriting. The things that bobbed, the others that sank. Then I found that forgotten picture. I stared and saw us as we were: you wore my boxer shorts. One of my undershirts. Your short, messy hair pasted to your forehead with sweat. The light brown freckle above your lip. The one I used to kiss. Your tiny wrists, your soft bare feet. Concert posters on the wall behind us. I never showed that photo to anyone. You were already gone. Reaching and pulling and closing my eyes, I emptied the box and stood. Before I looked away, I saw the ring before it sank, a few inches of red ribbon trailing behind it.

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?

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