STILL-LIFE WITH CHOKE PEAR
Conditioned by harm,
I was always told
Where to go
Or to not move at all.
Trust was a blood sport.
Hunger, heretical.
First, the defiance:
I was the lastborn
Thieved into speaking
Against the bright heel
Of the hound.
Then, the penance:
A sentence
Carved out in the jaw.
At my kindest, I am
Always to blame.
Not once
Did I want this
To be planted,
Let alone bloom.
____________________________________________________________________
BLACKOUT
When you left for the last time,
I stayed up all night waiting
For the hillside to give.
Then, hail.
Behind the gas station, I found
Our ghosts unraveling themselves
Out of aerosol-soaked rags.
The ghost brother, his face
As hideous as his sister’s.
We were hunted down.
Then, the world.
____________________________________________________________________
RICHARD QUIGLEY is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Columbia University. He lives and works in New York.
He sang /
like a gas station on a black summer night.
you stand a long time /
by the creek, then /
feed it two pennies, /
one for you, one /
for the love /
inside you that /
you can do nothing /
with or about.
A talisman against the agony /
in his knees and hips //
for which he was taking /
black-market fentanyl
I greet your gliding flight O wings of death / But there are other signs too
realizing that the horizon is a line constituting an intersection between at least two systems, the inner and the outer one. Between an observer on the move and the roads within the landscape ...
the story / the two white women will not retract, despite the fact /
that inside each story we tell another writes itself
the intoxicating ministry of dusk, the anchor of daylight lifting, sheets white / like a freshly crushed pill, // the vortex of the body and the clap of the / coral tongue...
Before we go any further, I want to publicly acknowledge //
that I love every person in this room. I mean it. /
We’ve traveled from all over to be here, and I love /
each of you, all of you, every last one of you, except /
Harold
I tithe 10% of my new underwear to my future /
self, the one who has fallen in love.
Along one river fell /
all the luck in the world.