Joshua McKinney
Joshua McKinney’s fifth book of poetry, Sad Animal (2024), won the inaugural John Ridland Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. His other awards include The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He is co-editor of the online ecopoetics zine, Clade Song.
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Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et inferos.* –Latin proverb
The view from the air belongs to no one,
and near the rear of the plane, wedged against
the window by a corpulent stranger, I feel
the economy of class, its heavy stratum
pressing down. Below us, vast and unfenced,
the wind-plowed clouds lie open as a field,
white clods furrowed by the wing’s wind-sheared
silver share. The eye does not repent
for what it sees as human, nor the numinous yield
earth’s plot to tilling or to till. Unowned, the stolen world
reveals.
*Whoever’s is the soil, it is theirs all the way to Heaven and all the way to Hell.
