INVERTED SYNTAX
  • Fissured Tongue Volume 6
  • Poetry Contest Results
    • 2024 POETRY BOOK CONTESTS RESULTS
    • Sublingua 2023 Results
    • Sublingua 2022 Results
    • Sublingua 2020 Results
    • Sublingua 2019 Results
  • The Fissured Tongue Series
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 5
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 4
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 3
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 2
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 1
    • The Fissured Tongue Series
      • Online Issue Two
      • Online Issue One
  • Submission Guidelines
    • POETRY BOOK CONTESTS
  • About Us
    • Masthead
    • More
      • Interviews
      • Blog
        • Blog
      • Resources
        • Writing resources
        • Mile-High MFA
          • Mile-High MFA Writers
          • Mile-High MFA Website
          • Faculty News & Interviews
    • Our Contributors
    • Mission
  • Store
  • Nominations & Awards
    • Pushcart Prize
    • Best of the Net
    • Best Micro Fiction
  • The Art of the Postcard
    • About The Art of the Postcard
    • Art of the Postcard Issue 3
    • Art of the Postcard Issue 2
    • Art of the Postcard Issue 1
    • We Are All Artists Exhibit
      • Video Compilation FirehouseArt Center Postcard Exhibit
      • Firehouse Exhibitors 2022
        • Churnage FirehouseArt Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Daniel Staub Weinberg Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Genevieve Rose Barr Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Eva Schultz Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Samantha Malay Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • D Allen Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Hayley Harris Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Tony Peyser Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Sarah Santoni Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Julia Klatt Singer Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Kathryn Kruse Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Meg Freer Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Moira Walsh Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Stephanie Staab Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Anne Swannell Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Laura Knott Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Jo Goren Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • CR Resetarits Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Sarah Ernestine Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Stephanie Johnson Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Charles J. March III Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Emily Mosley Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Grace Desmarais Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Emily Vieweg Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Claire Lawrence Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Meca'Ayo Cole Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Andrea Rexilius Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Christian Garduno Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Salma Ahmad Caller Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Glenn Thomas Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Claire Yspol Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Michael Thompson Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Rikki Santer Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Laura Gamache Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Christine Williams Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Stephanie Beechem Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Imma Dunach Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Ginny Short Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Josh Lefkowitz Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Carolyn Adams Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
      • We Are All Artists Exhibit Guide
      • We are All Artists Submission Form Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
  • Fissured Tongue Volume 6
  • Poetry Contest Results
    • 2024 POETRY BOOK CONTESTS RESULTS
    • Sublingua 2023 Results
    • Sublingua 2022 Results
    • Sublingua 2020 Results
    • Sublingua 2019 Results
  • The Fissured Tongue Series
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 5
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 4
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 3
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 2
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 1
    • The Fissured Tongue Series
      • Online Issue Two
      • Online Issue One
  • Submission Guidelines
    • POETRY BOOK CONTESTS
  • About Us
    • Masthead
    • More
      • Interviews
      • Blog
        • Blog
      • Resources
        • Writing resources
        • Mile-High MFA
          • Mile-High MFA Writers
          • Mile-High MFA Website
          • Faculty News & Interviews
    • Our Contributors
    • Mission
  • Store
  • Nominations & Awards
    • Pushcart Prize
    • Best of the Net
    • Best Micro Fiction
  • The Art of the Postcard
    • About The Art of the Postcard
    • Art of the Postcard Issue 3
    • Art of the Postcard Issue 2
    • Art of the Postcard Issue 1
    • We Are All Artists Exhibit
      • Video Compilation FirehouseArt Center Postcard Exhibit
      • Firehouse Exhibitors 2022
        • Churnage FirehouseArt Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Daniel Staub Weinberg Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Genevieve Rose Barr Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Eva Schultz Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Samantha Malay Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • D Allen Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Hayley Harris Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Tony Peyser Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Sarah Santoni Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Julia Klatt Singer Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Kathryn Kruse Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Meg Freer Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Moira Walsh Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Stephanie Staab Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Anne Swannell Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Laura Knott Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Jo Goren Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • CR Resetarits Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Sarah Ernestine Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Stephanie Johnson Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Charles J. March III Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Emily Mosley Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Grace Desmarais Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Emily Vieweg Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Claire Lawrence Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Meca'Ayo Cole Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Andrea Rexilius Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Christian Garduno Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Salma Ahmad Caller Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Glenn Thomas Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Claire Yspol Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Michael Thompson Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Rikki Santer Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Laura Gamache Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Christine Williams Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Stephanie Beechem Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Imma Dunach Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Ginny Short Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Josh Lefkowitz Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Carolyn Adams Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
      • We Are All Artists Exhibit Guide
      • We are All Artists Submission Form Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
Human expression is never orderly.
​It is a space of disruption.To let ourselves express means to be vulnerable.​It means to invert syntax so as to articulate the visceral. 

I n v e r t e d    S y n t a x

Picture

The birds begin to rust

John Sibley Williams
& crack; black wings coiling copper, flaking 
                 down on us. These days we’ll take

anything to fill our lungs with. Even
                horsehair, corroded barbs unlaced 

from fenceposts, clouds of sheered wool,
               a father’s promises. A country’s.

The dead have nothing but stories
              to roll around endlessly

in their mouths. Stories that reach us
              as screams. We used to

scream too. These days not much echoes
             apart from our burning

the surplus crops & harvesting the same
            from their ashes

& burning old photos just to remember
            the dead more fiercely. Please

give me back my war. I don’t know
          what to do with this much silence.
​
John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. An eleven-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, The 46er Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon. 
​
​About the work: “ “The birds begin to rust” began as a series of simple, pastoral, interconnected images in need of a context, until the idea of human voice emerged as a central theme. Echo or lack therefore. Scream or silence or having screamed so much we fall into an inevitable, exhausted silence. And this personal silence grew into cultural, political silence, including war and peacetime and having lost the impact our voice should have on society, which then returned to that deeply personal, human melancholy of resignation. Structurally, the poem employs traditional couplets in experimental ways, most importantly toying with punctuation and fragmenting lines. The goal for these experiments is to create a rough, non-fluid read that mirrors the rust and cracks that introduce the poem.
” 

The Art
PictureUNTITLED (A BULGARIAN FUNERAL), 80"X140", 2016
Daisy Patton has a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Oklahoma with minors in History and Art History and an Honors degree. Her MFA is from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University, a multi-disciplinary program. Patton's practice is focused on history, memory, and social commentary stemming from this youth soaked in such specific cultural landscapes. Her work explores the meaning and social conventions of families, little discussed or hidden histories, and what it is to be a person living in our contemporary world. One such series is Forgetting is so long, reviewed in Hyperallergic and The Denver Post, as well as featured in Create! Magazine, The Jealous Curator, Vasari21, Fraction Magazine, Full Blede, and Backroom Caracas. Patton is the recipient of the Montague Travel Grant for research in Dresden, Germany, and she was also awarded a position as an exchange student at the University of Hertfordshire, UK while an undergraduate. She has completed artist residencies at Minerva Projects, Anderson Ranch, the Studios at MASS MoCA, RedLine Denver, and Eastside International in Los Angeles. She has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, including her first museum solo at the CU Art Museum at the University of Colorado. K Contemporary represents Patton in Denver.  More here

​About the art : “Defacement is the confrontation with death and dislocation…”—Michael Taussig, Defacement. “ They say we die two deaths: the first is our actual passing; the second is when the last person who remembers us takes their final breath. Family photographs, vessels of memory, are integral to extending this quasi-life. They show a mother, a child, a past self, full of in-jokes and the mundane meaningful only to a select few. But divorced from their origins, these emotion-ridden images become unknowable and lost in translation, for they are intrinsically entwined with the intimate memories of someone. These images are timeless because photography can forever capture a moment—so much so that they have outlived their families and purpose, becoming orphans. As we drown in an overwhelming visual culture, what place does an old family photo have outside their original home? In Forgetting is so long, [the series which this painting is from] I collect abandoned, anonymous family photographs, enlarge them past their familiar size, and paint over them. I paint to disrupt, to reimagine, to re-enliven these individuals until I can either no longer recognize them or their presence is too piercing to continue. Family photographs are sacred relics to their loved ones, but unmoored the images become hauntingly absent. Anthropologist Michael Taussig states that defacing these types of objects forces a “shock into being;” suddenly we perceive them as present, revered, and piercing. By mixing painting with photography, I lengthen Roland Barthes’ “moment of death” (the photograph) into some semblance of purgatory. Not alive but not quite dead, each person’s newly imagined and altered portrait straddles the lines between memory, identity, and death. They are monuments to the forgotten. All works in this series are mixed media paintings (oil-painted photo prints), mounted on panel. A note on titling: all the paintings are technically untitled, but if there is any written information on the found photograph, that is included in parentheses. Otherwise, the bracketed wording is a general description.” 

FISSURED TONGUE SERIES 
print issues
​art of the postcard
blog
   About
    ​Masthead
    Submit 
    Subscribe
​
    Awards
Contact 
Join Our Team
​Resources
Picture
© COPYRIGHT 2018-2023 ​INVERTED SYNTAX PRESS LLC.  ​
​ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
P.O. BOX 2044, LONGMONT, COLORADO, 80502 , USA  PHONE:
‪(720) 378-7004‬

  • Fissured Tongue Volume 6
  • Poetry Contest Results
    • 2024 POETRY BOOK CONTESTS RESULTS
    • Sublingua 2023 Results
    • Sublingua 2022 Results
    • Sublingua 2020 Results
    • Sublingua 2019 Results
  • The Fissured Tongue Series
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 5
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 4
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 3
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 2
    • Fissured Tongue Volume 1
    • The Fissured Tongue Series
      • Online Issue Two
      • Online Issue One
  • Submission Guidelines
    • POETRY BOOK CONTESTS
  • About Us
    • Masthead
    • More
      • Interviews
      • Blog
        • Blog
      • Resources
        • Writing resources
        • Mile-High MFA
          • Mile-High MFA Writers
          • Mile-High MFA Website
          • Faculty News & Interviews
    • Our Contributors
    • Mission
  • Store
  • Nominations & Awards
    • Pushcart Prize
    • Best of the Net
    • Best Micro Fiction
  • The Art of the Postcard
    • About The Art of the Postcard
    • Art of the Postcard Issue 3
    • Art of the Postcard Issue 2
    • Art of the Postcard Issue 1
    • We Are All Artists Exhibit
      • Video Compilation FirehouseArt Center Postcard Exhibit
      • Firehouse Exhibitors 2022
        • Churnage FirehouseArt Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Daniel Staub Weinberg Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Genevieve Rose Barr Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Eva Schultz Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Samantha Malay Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • D Allen Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Hayley Harris Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Tony Peyser Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Sarah Santoni Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Julia Klatt Singer Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Kathryn Kruse Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Meg Freer Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Moira Walsh Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Stephanie Staab Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Anne Swannell Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Laura Knott Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Jo Goren Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • CR Resetarits Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Sarah Ernestine Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Stephanie Johnson Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Charles J. March III Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Emily Mosley Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Grace Desmarais Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Emily Vieweg Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Claire Lawrence Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Meca'Ayo Cole Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Andrea Rexilius Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Christian Garduno Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Salma Ahmad Caller Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Glenn Thomas Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Claire Yspol Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Michael Thompson Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Rikki Santer Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Laura Gamache Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Christine Williams Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Stephanie Beechem Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Imma Dunach Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Ginny Short Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Josh Lefkowitz Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
        • Carolyn Adams Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit
      • We Are All Artists Exhibit Guide
      • We are All Artists Submission Form Firehouse Art Center Postcard Exhibit