A Bunch of Beeps and Lights

POETRY
Written By James Kelly Quigley

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.

James Kelly Quigley

James Kelly Quigley’s poetry has received Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominations. Recent work has been published or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, New York Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, Narrative, SLICE, The American Journal of Poetry, THE BOILER, Salt Hill, and other places. He received both a BA and an MFA from New York University, where he taught undergraduate creative writing and was an editor of Washington Square Review. James was born and raised in New York. He works as a freelance writer in Brooklyn.

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