{"id":1972,"date":"2023-01-28T12:22:30","date_gmt":"2023-01-28T18:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thespectaclstg.wpengine.com\/?p=1972"},"modified":"2023-02-08T10:21:34","modified_gmt":"2023-02-08T16:21:34","slug":"poetry-by-james-kelly-quigley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/?p=1972","title":{"rendered":"Poetry by James Kelly Quigley"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Visit<\/h4>\n
having a grand ole ghoulish time lying \ndown in my mother\u2019s hair \nmetal albums \nlearning more about Whitesnake \nthan one can comfortably abide \nthe boys say all their songs are love songs \n\u201calthough that wasn\u2019t a conscious decision\u201d \nwe must counterbalance this claim against the fact \nthat the phrase \u201cslide it in\u201d appears 23 times \non the track \u201cSlide It In\u201d from their record Slide It In<\/em> \nmy mother\u2019s cats are passing notes from the underworld \nin a laguna of sunlight where I could splash around too \nbut I refrain out of respect for their skittishness \nwhy did I wear my very best suit today \nI knew I\u2019d be doing precisely what I\u2019m doing \nlater I\u2019ll take the Metro North back to Grand Central \nthen walk to Bryant Park and take the F to Brooklyn \nI\u2019ll stop at the bakery for some hamantaschen \nbecause the word came to me when I closed my eyes \nafter flipping through photos by Cartier-Bresson \nmy favorite kind snapped on the streets full of \nhuman beings being human beings \na studio portrait simply does not lessen my inclination \nto murder passersby under a sickle of blue sky \nor a blueish sky or at least a blue-esque one \ntell the inspector my motive was love \npornography is my m\u00e9tier \na series of low-angle penetrative acts argues more \npersuasively than the suicide-obsessed French theorists \nwhy it\u2019s okay that we\u2019re all going to die \nbut before I can go home I have to say thanks and \nsee you soon and I love you and I need money\n\n<\/pre>\n
\n
Door to the Sea<\/h4>\n
I don\u2019t ask for much \nall I want is an airport \nnamed after me like \nCharles de Gaulle \nthose winter fields wet \nwith dread I remember \nthe exact moment \nof my birth it was as if \nmy mother were \nlacing up her rain boots \nthen the canes of bamboo \nran around headless \nI was uncontestedly me \nand I suspect this was \nif not a mistake then \nan unfortunate eventuality \nwhen two people are in love \nwith drugs \nit\u2019s strange they\u2019re both \nquite easy and rather difficult \nto persuade \npicking spiders from their arms \nthe innocent mysticism \nsometimes I find myself chuckling \nwhen a woman slips \ndown the metro staircase or \nwhen a friend is saying goodbye \nbut his eyes are saying catch me \nthe pinkness of this sky \nand how the buildings step aside \nmaking a channel to the sea \nthe pinkness of the sea \nthe way that it begs\n\n\f\n<\/pre>\n
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Marble<\/h4>\n
when I talk about the imagination as my condition \nthere is a flooded creek overtaking the yellow leaves \nbehind the bone-still summer school in Denver \nyou introduced me to the most handsome pilot \nhe called you his little bunny or somesuch \nand his wife the English expat \nwe ate saag paneer after her hysterectomy \na fine day in early June even the pollen pleased me \nat rest you look worried people tell you this incessantly \nyou have a resting look of doom \nI know you down to the dry white cracks \ndawning on the sides of your ankles \na stone flower pot on the steps of the public library \nwalking through the drab sodden heather I know you \nat the pondside where the dogs swim I\u2019m certain I know you \nthe way a sycamore slipping out of its bark in the late season \nhas a placid awareness of that long goodbye \nit\u2019s your eyebrows that get you in trouble \nhow they furl at the ends like notebook pages \nheavy with the ink of unbreakable oaths to a first crush \nthis face may as well be mine I regard it as such \nquietly I try to find it in the marble<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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<\/p>\n\n\n\n
James Kelly Quigley is the winner of the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry. Named among the \u201c30 Below 30\u201d list by Narrative Magazine<\/em>, James is also a Pushcart Prize and two-time Best New Poets<\/em> nominee. His manuscript\u00a0Bath; or, My Dynamic Attitude Toward What Is Erroneously Called the Afterlife\u00a0<\/em>was a finalist for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry (2022), as well as a semi-finalist for the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize (2022). Recent work has been published or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review<\/em>, New York Quarterly<\/em>, Denver Quarterly<\/em>, Ninth Letter<\/em>, The American Journal of Poetry<\/em>, 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<\/em>. James was born and raised in New York. He works as a freelance writer in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Visit | Door to the Sea | Marble<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2018,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[85],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}