She listened with her cyclopean eye to what the umbers had sung when their baritone hues leached light from each low note. Not a linear song, but the past-present spent in the everywhen … where one might not utter what an ancestor lived, or might do tomorrow or today. Colors’ throaty spectacles plot certain unseen rhythms even cicadas fail to drown. To know a thing is to hear the drum of scent, touch the chamber of its stillness, and feel its wisdom in your fingertips, the split of your tongue, and in your toes’ faint ringing.
Koss is a mixed-race queer writer, poet, and artist with work in many journals, including Diode Poetry, Midway Journal, The Pinch, Red Ogre Review, Five Points, Moonpark Review, Moist Poetry, San Pedro River Review, Petrichor, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, Gooseberry Pie, Chiron, The Fence, South Florida Poetry Review, and many others. Their work has been in many anthologies, including two volumes of The Dead of Winter, Best Small Fictions, and Beyond the Frame.
Find links to their work on koss-works.com, and purchase their Lammy finalist chapbook and Diode chapbook contest winner, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect, at Diode Editions.