#Courtney Hitson

[abellinthecupboard]

Snorkeling, 2024

The reefs, excruciated into ossuaries are speckless—immaculately dead. A tangle of stark, white neurons blanched quiet, into the worst kind of peace. What fish remain swim lethargic, wayward paths, like a calligraphy bleeding off the page. Is this the price of witness? An epic, stoney corpse glares an apathy out of her assassin’s accomplice.

— Courtney Hitson, featured in Rust & Moth, Autumn 2024 Issue (source)

[abellinthecupboard]

To the baby chicks at the bird sanctuary

I love how tender you make the hands of a Trump voter. As if your delicate were, itself, delicate. You, chickadee, awake a gentleness from the same fingers that clicked like on a post advocating debtors prison. You smell this green world from inside your first, inhaling your mother’s unseeable goodness, trying (like so many of us) to salvage her sublime. So, it’s unsurprising your soul could weaken this frost-bit, southern sundae of a Samaritan, melted and refrozen his caramel ribbons, knotted at the bottom.

— Courtney Hitson, featured in About Place Journal, October 2024 Issue (source)