THE FIRMAMENT BELOW
J. M. Hall
broken bottle shards
sparkle under flip-flopped strides:
stars on the concrete.
Author's Commentary: This piece was composed during a summer's walk in Atlanta, near Deepdene Park, and inspired by my recently-completed essay on Richard Wright's populist and satirical improvisations on the haiku form (an excerpt of which I will present at this spring's annual conference of the Long Island Philosophical Society, under the title "The Necessary Pain of Moral Imagination: Richard Wright’s White Man, Listen! and Haiku”).
J. M. Hall has published a small chapbook collection and sixty-seven individual poems in literary journals internationally, including multiple Pushcart Prize-winners, Ibbetson St. Magazine, Main Street Rag and Shampoo. Currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at CUNY Queensborough, he has also published a coedited anthology (entitled Philosophy Imprisoned), thirty peer-reviewed journal articles (including in Philosophy and Literature and Southern Literary Journal), and nine anthology chapters (including in Fulcrum: An Anthology of Poetry and Aesthetics). Finally, he has twenty years’ experience as a choreographer, dance instructor and performer.
