Punctuated: A Love Story
poems by
Jessica K. Hylton
~40 pages, $13 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: May/June 2026
An Advance Sale Discount price of $8 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $12/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.
Jessica K. Hylton is a poet, editor, and educator. She is the author of Gag Order (akinoga press) and The Great Scissor Hunt (Headmistress Press), with work appearing in journals and anthologies including Southern Poetry Anthology, Lavender Review, and KANSAS! Magazine. She holds a Ph.D. in English with a focus in Creative Writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is Associate Editor at Main Street Rag Publishing Company and founder of DisruptivePoets.com. She teaches writing and communication at Kansas State University Salina and lives in Kansas, which is slightly less full of lesbians than Melissa Etheridge promised, but still worth writing about.
Love is not a sonnet love poem with fourteen lines of predictable rhyme and meter. Sometimes it is a run-on sentence that does not know where to start or stop and sometimes it follows the rules of grammar — commas, semi-colons, periods, exclamation points, question marks and maybe an ellipsis when love does not know what it wants or needs. Jessy Hylton’s Punctuated: A Love Story is the latter — modern poetry about twenty first century love. Buy her book; it’s not a book of sonnet love poems. ~Al Black
Jessica Hylton’s new chapbook, Punctuation: A Love Story, is for everyone who has experienced / is experiencing / will experience one or more of the following: falling in love, being in love, breaking up, or unrequited love. Hylton’s brilliant use of punctuation marks—as sometimes charming, sometimes heartbreaking metaphors for the challenges of love—entertain and captivate the reader from commas to parentheses to ellipses. (I could go on and on about this little book…) ~Richard Allen Taylor, Author, Geography of One
Colon: The Beginning I Never Saw Coming
She wasn’t the person I was supposed to want.
She wasn’t even supposed to come that day.
But language doesn’t ask for permission
before it adds the colon:
this.
Her.
Everything after.
I tried to stay in my clause,
tight with loyalty,
lined up like a good sentence
headed somewhere expected—
but syntax shifts
when someone walks in
wearing contradiction like poise
and looking through me
like a question I never meant to ask.
So I wrote a Cowboy.
Said she should meet him—
he had horses, boots,
a jaw like heterosexual intention.
It was harmless prose, I swore.
I only invited her over
so I could invite him too.
I only made dinner plans
if it could be a group thing.
I only dressed up
because it’s polite.
I only stayed alive
because of her laugh in the other room.
It wasn’t love,
or at least
that’s what I said
when I needed to keep saying
anything at all.
But I was already past the colon.
Already in the second clause.
Already building the sentence
that didn’t need a subject
because the object was enough.
Her name
A beginning
A longing
where a full stop should’ve been.
Exclamation Point: Carrying All the Punctuation!
Check on the house.
Feed the cats.
Make sure the pipes don’t freeze.
Respond when I message.
So I did.
Forty minutes there, forty minutes back.
Litter box scooped, mail stacked,
and every morning at 3 a.m.,
I sat up in bed
like I’d been trained for it—
ready to listen
for the soft ding of your text
sailing in from across the ocean.
You told me about fish stew and tile streets.
About men who stared too long,
the wind off the cliffs,
and tattooed chefs that made me jealous.
You told me everything
but why I mattered.
Why I was the one you always woke up.
Still, I answered like it was a test,
and I wanted to pass.
When you came back sick,
I showed up
with soup, brownies,
a tulip stolen from some Trump supporter’s yard
(they don’t deserve beautiful things)
and a gnome you were meant to hate—
drawn wobbly and grinning with a sign that read:
I heard you think we’re ugly,
so, I’ll say this smugly—
since you’ve been gone,
and I’ve been drawn
I think I’m rather lovely.
But you
were furious.
Not even a period.
Just a sharp breath.
No thank you.
No why.
Just a scolding
for caring too loud.
In a rare moment
of sanity?
of self-respect?
I texted you.
I need to try to stay away
from you for my own sanity.
A lowercase sentence
with no reply.
Two days later
you asked:
“Are you done being mad?”
But it never really was a question
because we both knew it never
really was a question.
And just like that,
I was.
Always the person carrying
all the punctuation
while you?
Can’t even admit
there is a sentence
happening.
Period: How do you write a sentence
knowing it must end?
You start with fire—
words scorching the page,
an unforgiving burn
that hurts her, hurts me,
shaping regret like a blade.
You press and edit,
holding your breath between lines,
trying to stitch the tear,
to make sense
of broken things.
But a sentence must close,
a poem must stop
even if the heart protests,
even if the story feels unfinished,
even if the scar still stings.
So you set down the pen—
not because it’s perfect,
not because it’s over—
but because some endings
are a kind of salvation.
And in that final period,
there is both loss
and a fierce kind of grace.
