Joshua W.J. Brown is a queer Toronto writer from the Sarnia–Lambton / St. Clair River corridor. His work moves through family records, borderland memory, disability, digital overload, devotional error, ordinary speech, and the pressure of being misheard.
His current poetry grows from voice-note fragments, genealogy, administrative survival, and the places where a private sentence becomes evidence.
DIRECT LINE
Tell us about the Longshore Institute.
Not the decorative version.
The direct line.
From there to here.
Not “he came from Detroit” like Detroit is a junk drawer for lazy ancestry.
Detroit is not filler.
Detroit is the crossing.
Detroit is the water.
Detroit is the smoke on the record.
Detroit is the city loud enough to survive bad listening.
You said Deuteronomy.
I said Detroit.
In the bath.
Loud.
Everybody heard it, good, that was the point.
Not Moses.
Not commandments.
Not some wet holy-book mistake sliding down the tile.
Detroit.
The city.
The line.
The proof.
One wrong word and the dead walk through the wrong door.
That is how genealogy gets wrecked.
Not by mystery.
By softness.
By somebody almost hearing.
By a second brain acting like “close enough” is a method.
No.
Arthur Sisman, four to five.
Genealogy Consultation.
Started the timer.
No more meetings today.
Good.
One hour to make the line behave.
Name.
Place.
Date.
Crossing.
Source.
Contradiction.
Correction.
Next proof.
That’s the work.
No wandering off into mist.
No “he came from Detroit” unless Detroit gets opened properly.
Who was there.
Who wrote it down.
Who misspelled it.
Who made the family smaller because the record was tired.
And yes, I still can’t believe I got this bitch
to drag my inbox down
from two hundred thousand emails
to about a thousand.
That is not cleanup.
That is exorcism.
That is a landfill becoming a room again.
People say don’t delete emails
like the inbox is a moral archive
and if you have too many
you’re probably a sociopath.
No.
I am not a sociopath.
I am buried in administrative insects.
Every company, form, receipt, reminder, password, appointment, failure,
all of them breeding in the walls
and somehow the human is the disorder.
Fine.
We cleared it.
A miracle with a trash icon.
Now the dead.
Now Detroit.
Now Arthur.
Now the line.
And no, I’m not doing a fake fourth time.
There is no fourth time.
Fourth time is a trap with manners.
Fourth time is patience being harvested.
Fourth time is somebody calling me thief
after being treated like a guest.
Things were going well.
That was the danger.
I complimented the guest
and the room started lying.
Then the choice happened.
Then the little proving machine came out.
Then done meant done.
So do not make me reopen what already closed.
I have one hour.
I have Detroit in the bath.
I have the Longshore Institute.
I have an inbox pulled back from hell.
I have a brain that drops pieces
because it is carrying too many rooms at once.
That is why the second brain exists.
Not to parrot.
To catch.
Not to summarize.
To complete.
Fill the blank before it becomes a hole.
Hear Detroit before it becomes Deuteronomy.
Hold the ancestor before he gets filed under almost.
Direct line.
From there to here.
No fog.
No fake fourth time.
No lazy ear.
Detroit.
Open it.
The Galway Review 