Benjamin Thorne

and &

“And” is the hungriest word,
demanding something to follow,
to be joined with what came before.
You can even see it in the ampersand,
sinuous thread of a coiled snake
set to strike its own tail: a Roman compression
of letters not content to be by itself, spawned
by scribes’ hands cramped by empire’s sprawl,
the ever-unfolding scrolls of maps, laws, and
histories, the ligatures of dominion.
Each new conquest, an accumulation of text,
of time; a ravenous unraveling of lives, inked
with tireless fatigue: taking
lands and slaves and art and dreams and time and work and flora and fauna and metals
and minerals and water and fields and gods and demons and heroes and children and
&

Erasures

Bracing for effacement, I steady
my breath before entering your room.
Strange, how hard it is stand before you,
whom I’ve known since before I knew
anything, who stood for months with
me inside you. Strange too, the word,
to face, a thing at odds with itself,
a confrontation and a covering over,
recognition and forgetting—your face
brightening when I visit, only to dim
again (and again); but still I see it
in dementia’s creeping shadow,
your love flickering alive beneath
the haze, a moon swathed in clouds.

Nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net, M. Benjamin Thorne is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wingate University. Possessed of a lifelong love of history and poetry, he is interested in exploring the synergy between the two. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Thimble Lit Mag, Last Syllable Lit, Salvation South, Does It Have Pockets?, Pictura Journal, and Heimat Review. In 2025 his work was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship. He lives and sometimes sleeps in Charlotte, NC.