Tyler Barton is the author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum (Sarabande) and The Quiet Part Loud (Split/Lip). His fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, and has been twice listed as “Distinguished” by Best American Short Stories. With the artist Erin Dorney he co-curates the ongoing literary art installation, “The Hidden Museum,” currently on view at the Susquehanna Museum of Art. He lives in Saranac Lake, NY where he works for the Adirondack Center for Writing. Find him @tylerbartonlol or tsbarton.com
Gutters reads America’s remaining local print newspapers to create a found poetry of lost housing. All text is found spanning the gap (‘gutter’) between two or more adjacent columns of newsprint in articles pertaining to the housing crisis, land conservation, and climate catastrophe.
Whenever she passes a picture she’s in, Jewell closes her eyes. She laughs. Jewell’s earlobes are drippingly long, and her granddaughter Tanny would like to see them pierced nine, maybe ten times. This makes Jewell laugh. Jewell has been convinced by friends to join the poetry club, because, they say, Jewell is always finishing their sentences with a slant rhyme, and damnit they want the real thing! Jewell laughs at them. The poetry teacher is a bear of a man at a pottery wheel until Jewell is told he is the pottery teacher. Jewell laughs through her apology. The poetry…