Rods & Cones
By R.J. Lambert
Given horses, I learn to ride
from my mistakes, men spreading
in the kicks of dirt. To mount
before the others, early sun grasping
over hills. Light like a wrist, light like a rib,
light like the fresh green fingers of sod.
To shade the shed with my run,
sight blurring its all-too-quick, too-big.
To ride past those who can’t say “no”
when “yes” suffices. To find “yes”
feels quite right & lie awake inside
the dream. To think, I thought
the earth had almost broke apart.
To trust the ground is sometimes held
together by a single root of grass.
About the Author:
R.J. Lambert (he, him, his) is a queer writer, scholar, and teacher based in South Carolina. His debut poetry collection, Mind Lit in Neon, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He received the 2021 Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry from New Letters and was a published finalist for competitions from Crab Creek Review and Tupelo Quarterly. Individual poems are soon to appear in New Letters, peculiar, The Worcester Review, and the anthology Without a Doubt (New York Quarterly Books). R.J. teaches science writing and health communication at the Medical University of South Carolina. Find him online at rj-lambert.com.
A Celebration of LGBTQ Writers & Artists
Taken from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and the poem “Rooms,” our series title appears in the line: “Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.”
All Accounts & Mixture is CutBank’s annual space for queer writers and artists, and we’re incredibly proud and honored to present this year’s bunch of daring, earnest, and straight up wild pieces. Our sincerest thanks to the contributors, as well as to each and every submitter to this year’s feature. Reading your work is a privilege, one we hope to continue undertaking for a long while.
