Morning Street
Morning’s no
one-time storm—
is mere,
is integer.
Morning is émigré,
street noire, testier,
rime most rotten!
Griot. Grist.
Rioting rioter.
Sentient morning,
egoist entire, soignée
in nitrogen garment.
O gemstone. O morning:
no segment,
no omen.
Innermost engine.
Totem.
Winner of the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize in 2016 and the Tucson Literary Award (Poetry) in 2017, Lynne Thompson is the author of Start With a Small Guitar and Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in such journals as Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, African American Review, Fourth River, Salamander, and Poetry, among others. Thompson received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles in 2015 and is Reviews and Essays Editor of the literary journal Spillway.