James Kelly Quigley

Rain (Redux)

as the rain rains
it makes the park wormy
and full of rain
in whose auspicious
company I am
ancient and indisputable
eating candy cigarettes
in a kiddie pool
cuz it’s a good time
on the cheap
I am buzzy
almost waltzing
but mostly tumbling
into somebody’s
aunt’s arms’
warm sausage
her maternity gown a new
better kind of drapery
the rain woven
with smoke at the patrol’s
cracked-open window seems
to be orchestrating everything
even the intrusion of tarot
into polite chat
about the new James Bond
city of black bread
and daisy chains
I can only get so philosophical
it’s more enjoyable to be
dumbfounded by
human people
all over the place
buying things and
saying things of no consequence to
draw out their goodbyes
oh good old-fashioned rain
a dancer
trying to mimic
a cave-in

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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.