Cotton Xenomorph is a literary journal produced with the mission to showcase written and visual art while reducing language of oppression in our community. We are dedicated to uplifting new and established voices while engaging in thoughtful conversation around social justice.

my mother's love was a wild thing

BY Anthony Thomas Lombardi


God is beneath the porch
where the dog died. your knees
rubbed raw crawling over gravel
you needed to know what it was
he crept down there for. the dog
i mean. becomes a wolf. jaw locked
into a newborn’s neck gingerly
swept from this stone to that
stone. cubs licking kith & kin clean
one motion becoming the next
motion. i wasn’t even born i was
hatched tucked into the pleats
of a black hawk’s abandoned nest.
i wasn’t crying i was learning battle
cries in D minor sheet music
on your abdomen. a C section
unmapping. notes bright & bleak—no
beautiful. an orphan from the bad
-lands i climb the highest knolls
& knotted ropes with enough spit
to spare for stamps a stack
of postcards softened by sunlight.
the seine the danube the ganges
panoramic & stoic as highway
deer while lovers limber & honey
-dipped pirouette until doomsday
in their grand pas de deux. i kissed
the burns on your palms sandstone
kissed by waning light then dead light
cast over three acres of meadow.
i ran through them for hours
sometimes weeks you never leaned
out of a window i never heard
through dusk or debris
a song my name a sour note.
my hope wasn’t helping you.
my hope isn’t helping you.
somewhere some young scientist

is grateful for the gift of your heart.
sometimes by noon i’m tapped i want
to start another day. some mornings
i believe in as many as eleven impossible
things before breakfast recall still dark
mornings hunting for still rushing rivers
in my forearms hips toes. a shriek above
or its echo cracks the sky sheltering too
the cull cows. my favorite drugs
were the ones that brought me closest
to God to collapse
like shown & shone wound
or wound hairs i wouldn’t split.
it wasn’t a crime to be your son.
for years i saw your sins in black & white
convinced i’d turned your spilled blood
to sacrament lush as a pearl
handled pistol. the gravestones we couldn’t
find our dead without are swallowed
where the earth curves as dark
an omen a homeland can hide.
here’s something else you can’t
believe: i saw the caliber they dug
from your patron saint’s chest
flattened metal still plinking
to the floor like hawk hatchlings.
i said the number last night
standing by the ocean making ocean
sounds ordinary as the pilot who
wakes from a coma speaking
a new language. you’re looking down
from the mantelpiece like light
suspended from a street lamp
without falling it’s terrifying.
it’s not like there was ever any
ground that could hold you.
it’s not like holding you
is a thing i know how
to miss.



Anthony Thomas Lombardi is the author of Murmurations (YesYes Books, 2025), a Poetry Project 2021-2022 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, and a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, among other accolades. He is the founder and director of Word is Bond, a community-centered benefit reading series partnered with Brooklyn Poets that raises funds for transnational relief efforts and mutual aid organizations; has taught or continues to teach with Borough of Manhattan Community College, Paris College of Art, Brooklyn Poets, Southeast Review, Polyphony Lit’s apprenticeship programming, and community programming throughout New York City; and currently serves as a poetry editor for Sundog Lit. His work has appeared in Best New Poets, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Nashville Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat, Dilla.

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