Waking Up In Trump’s America by Ann-Marie Brown
BIG BANG
Lynn Thayer
It starts with weight loss. A few pounds
across weeks even when your hands
still reach for cake, a glass of red wine.
Rewind. It starts with pain. The kind
that fuzzes corners of your vision
like an encroaching swarm, wasp
sounds raging, building to hostile crescendo.
Except the noise isn’t nature’s warning,
it’s great swaths of your own blood blitzing
smaller capillaries around your head, ears
until you think I might pass out but you don’t.
For the next year you’ll often think
of that night in Dallas when you excused yourself
from dinner, walked swiftly to your room
to not incite panic among coworkers and
called your husband to say I might not make it home.
It’s your voice and it’s not. Your body and not.
Between flesh and mind, love and friendship
entanglement pulls taut, together, intertwined
like electrons drifting through two different galaxies.
Rewind, further still. It starts from nothing.
Indiscriminately. As unwanted things tend to do—
once absent then present, a beginning
a big bang without the big or the bang
just one cell dividing, then adding
and adding and adding and
Lynn Thayer is a multidisciplinary artist living with chronic disability in Colorado. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Santa Clara Review, Bicoastal Review, Wild Roof Journal, Months to Year, and Tendon Magazine among other journals. Her first chapbook, A BODY IS NOT AN OMEN, was a finalist for Cathexis Northwest Press’ Unpublished Author Contest in 2025. See more of her work at www.lynnthayer.com.
Ann-Marie Brown is a Canadian artist known for her encaustic paintings that explore emotional and psychological depth through ambiguity, texture, and intuitive process. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and the U.S., with recent shows at Soul Gallery (Winnipeg) and the Women’s Art Museum of Canada (Edmonton). Her paintings are held in the permanent collections of Senvest, the Women’s Art Museum of Canada, and the Encaustic Art Museum (Santa Fe). Residencies have allowed her to work in studios internationally, most recently during an extended residency in Helsinki awarded by the Artists’ Association of Finland. She currently lives and paints on the edge of the Salish Sea.