My Father Took Me Hunting
because we had given up other ways to make music. The white hummingbird of buckshot is not melodic, but neither is silence. What I recall I recall scarcely. Like a sostenuto hanging so faint it may not be there at all, I could convince myself this is just resonance. To this day I forget the aurora of gunsmoke gathered over a rabbit. Pink slime wetting the dry pages of what he explained was now more fertile ground—this is not what I return to in my sleep. Not what I kneel before on a granite slab & confess to. Nothing reminds me of the slump of boots in far-off mossy places. The cadenza of hooves from a doe bolting in the brush is still not playing. How could I have known that what is said is just the opening to what is not, when he paused on the trail & whispered not bad, not bad
Getting Over It
You call it a process of becoming
more fully human. How we’re sustained
when these corridors of grief & the wax
museum at the end of them collapse
into something hot & dense. You say
you can’t recontextualize a landmine.
It’s right there in the dirt, with
the bird bones & apple cores. Let’s
call the bombs bombs, you say, they
have no issue naming us. Let’s mourn
the bonefish even as it slaps against
the pier. The illusion that love can be
its own redemption. You say this is
just a way to tread water. & water
will only remind you of that insatiable
thirst for landscape. The figure / ground
dynamic you can’t point to purely,
but exists a little bit more each time
you try. There’s something generous
about it; loss that is the result of
discovery. & if you can’t discover,
you say, invent.
Notes at the Grave of James Felix Quigley (excerpt)
—November, resodded
Okay but there are some things I believe in if not this
The delicate work of harmless androids
Watch them crane their alloyed necks
Like tulips to sunlight
As they solder each boy to his mother
Each father to his private dogma
Each idle night to its hillside
An assembly line of perfect mechanical ghosts
Putting the world on a belt
That goes on & on
Everything heads where it’s headed
With such efficiency
You might not think of a pearl no one ever finds as efficient
Slim & milkwhite but useless
This is where I say love is a useless pearl
James Kelly Quigley is a Best New Poets- and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose work has been published or is upcoming in Narrative Magazine, Nashville Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and other literary journals. He is an MFA candidate at New York University, where he currently teaches creative writing and serves as Copy Editor of Washington Square Review. James was born and raised in New York, and lives in Brooklyn.