James Kelly Quigley

Rain

I’ll stop writing about the rain when it stops raining.
If silence comes for the birdseed in your hand, don’t breathe.
You’ll know whether its wings are hope or grief.

Speedwalking alone in the rain with purple dumbbells
she knows the past is irretrievable. The future is out there
but unreachable, like seeing the ocean on TV

and gliding your fingers over the buzzy, magnetized glass.
Where the cuffs dug in, he rubs his wrists
with that particular American exuberance

we have for mimicking the movies. When Scorsese shot Taxi Driver
he had no money for lights, so his DP told him
“Wait until it gets dark and the city will light itself.”

When I die, bury me in neon. Tell everyone
I went straight to hell and miss them terribly.
Plant a tree in the park for me—

whichever kind Taylor prefers. Give my books to the library.
Enjoy the silence. Talk to the rain with your hands.

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James Kelly Quigley is the winner of the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry. He is also a Pushcart Prize and two-time Best New Poets nominee. His manuscript Aloneness was a finalist for the 2022 Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. 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 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.