Jackson Bliss

image of Jackson Bliss

Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Book Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), Dream Pop Origami (Unsolicited Press, 2022), and the speculative hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, and Longreads, among others. He is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University and lives in L.A.

Lyrics Without Songs

book cover of Dream Pop Origami

It was an idyllic spring afternoon when my mom beat the shit out of me, the zeppelin inside my heart bursting into flames. Before I stepped inside the house, the treetops were drenched in untranslatable komorebi amid the rolling green hills of yesterday. Dandelion clocks disintegrated in a puff. Posters of paint-smudged fishing towns hung from living room walls of houses I passed on my bike. The fuzzy navel sunset spilled onto the parchment horizon. When my mom wailed on my body like a disobedient dog in the kitchen, I lost faith in the entire world.