New Year’s Eve
By James Kelly Quigley
On the white lane of my heart
I can see for miles, leagues
in every direction, even down.
No one is coming to save me.
So tonight I open the blinds
to face the slow, bright music.
To think it was me
who'd been singing all this time,
confusing the sex-starved birds.
This place is swollen with light,
cock-eyed, punch-drunk,
and its ears are cauliflowers.
Loneliness costs gobs of money
but the pink champagne is gratis.
And it feels somehow overdue.
A Bunch of Beeps and Lights
By James Kelly Quigley
Getting so high you can’t speak
as a way to forgive yourself.
As a prank on your kids.
As a means of empathizing
with a loyal bar of soap.
And naturally the snowmelt
of her breath sends us all
home early from school.
Then it’s a video of a motorist
helping an upturned tortoise
shimmy onto his legs in the meadow.
Because tortoises know only one thing
and that’s the same thing we know.
Then it’s an entire community of smoke.
At the town hall meeting slash choir rehearsal
Maureen slumps over in a folding chair
dying effortlessly among friends.
Next, a shoehorn in an evidence locker.
Six cassette tapes of the Iliad.
A gaggle of cutthroat hula hoopers.
Ice storms that leave little notes
written in a doctor’s script all over the water.
A bunch of beeps and lights.
Then it’s me.
Then it’s me again
but this time, less so.
In the Woods
By Terry Belew
I could describe the intricacies
of moss,
the way leaves push
in summer,
a birch sapling cowering
beneath a parent,
a fox
in a hollowed-out tree,
how the light shines
through foliage.
None of that matters.
Just north, there is a tower’s
blinking strobe.
I take a picture
of a caterpillar
because I know someone
who would like that. I smell the fresh
clear-cut before I see it
and I’m not appalled,
I just look
down into my hands
to find where I am.
On the Balcony
By Christine Degenaars
When we were sleeping, nearly sleeping
and I was on my side and you, with your right
hand, claimed the slope of my thigh,
valley of hip and bone, when we looked out
the window at other windows, and when we closed
our eyes, then opened again, to measure the faint
ongoings and coming backs, the evening pace
of peace, that silky wing, as we slipped to sleep,
a light turned on, someone surfaced on the balcony,
faced us, lit a cigarette and spit off the ribboned railing
that looked like the toothy black of piano keys,
and yes, I said, he sees us—his eyes on me,
our resting form, he knows I’m watching still—still
we didn’t close the blinds, not you nor me, we let him
in, and something was lost, washed clean and
tossed to him from us, from me, and that night
it was that faceless face I dreamed, and we, I
dreamed, were tigers, we paced an empty cage.
First Daughter
By Christine Degenaars
A scenario: something
tragic happens to my family, all my friends,
and I go off alone to settle again into a bright
sadness, in this, I have a daughter.
We live above a bakery,
sleep on cots of newspaper, old cloth.
My hands raw from the bread and scones
we knead each morning. With cupcake liners,
she makes skirts for her fingers,
we never have enough for her pinkies.
Still she twirls, hands up. In the single shaft
of light, dust turns the air a kind of gold. Other times,
we stay in shaded cabins, soggy with pine,
hers a slightly smaller version of mine.
We carve our names into mossy stones,
sound out the letters, “Chr” then “I”. Soil collects
like a dark stream under our nails.
We wake groggy, wet with dew, hair
matted like deer or wild boar. I chase her
on my hands and knees and she runs, skips
over an open root and becomes fully fawn.
But sometimes, when I imagine my girl, she is nothing
more than human. We sit on dirty benches
in airport terminals, her little hand in mine,
head resting on our luggage.
We argue to show my patience. She laughs
to demonstrate my good humor
in calamity. I carry her from door to door,
day to day, as I would an old suitcase.
I open, lay her bare. I would, I do.