BROWSE Columns
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From King Tutankamen’s Diary
The heat of a summer breeze sweeping through the night, then daylight,
Chrysanthemum can’t find in dirt its depths, and like the rice or wheat
strewn out in plats of stem and chaff, a carafe of faience for the wildflowers,
singing out like loin cloth on milk-soaked hums, the bowl of porridge
with flies on by, de dah on by, the fly speaks in whispers of the cows by the
sun-soaked reeds, and Khephra calls collect to me from the eternal glaze,
like how the sun comes up because of dung beetle’s battle with gravity,
and somewhere in this moment your third eye opens from the field of it,
soaked in the rain last week and steeped in glycerin to make your mind
wind in colorful circles, like nothing you’ve ever seen, fractals from the
ancient past illuminated from the ergot you got while harvesting. Harvesting,
always harvesting, and all I want to do is run free. Look at the light-leak
through the trees, feel the heat of the summer breeze, and of for more
this beauty seemed to speak to me nightly in my dreams.
Ashby Logan Hill is a poet, writer, artist, and educator from Harrisonburg, Virginia currently living in Richmond. He holds an MFA in Poetry from UMASS Amherst (2017) where he read for "jubilat," and received a B.A. in English with Creative Writing and Art Minors from James Madison University (2012). His works are featured in "The Oregon Hill Review," "voicemail poems," "WHURK Cultural Review," "Byrd Whistle," the 2024 PSV Anthology, and elsewhere. He is the author of the recently published chapbook "You Went to the River to See What it Would Be Like to Become a Fish" (Bottlecap Press 2025). @aloganhill / @poemsforpeoplerva / @poemsforpeopleva / @americanslant
