Brigham Pettit
I'm Brigham. I write poems about longing, death, and the profound absurdity of being human.
I recently graduated from Texas A&M University, where I served as Editor in Chief of the undergraduate literary journal, The Eckleburg Project. I'm currently placing poems and working on my first chapbook.
Featured Poem
Amethyst
My sister gathers gemstones
the way I hoard my words.
She sits, I kneel, at her box of rocks,
and I test my stock against hers.
I pick up an amethyst — this
fistful of pixies
in a cystic crystal prison.
I’ve never met a purple so prismatic,
so cryptic, enigmatic.
She shows me clear quartz,
a hexagonal lattice of glass.
And the amethyst… is this, she says,
the same but stained with iron.
(It must be pixie blood:
see how it drips, and glitters.)
I see so much of myself in her.
I watch her study the stones
like an old museum curator,
a nine-year-old collector
and lover of the earth.
I see too much of myself in her.
She’s driven to this
out of something less innocent
than love. Out of a vicious insistence,
the blistering unanswered existence:
whether this world is magic
or just a victim to its tricks.
Originally appeared in The Eckleburg Project