Jennie Jieun Lee, Norma, 2015. Glazed stoneware, 17 × 18 × 1 inches. Courtesy the artist and Martos Gallery, New York.


Jennie Jieun Lee, Norma, 2015. Glazed stoneware, 17 × 18 × 1 inches. Courtesy the artist and Martos Gallery, New York.

 

The City

by James Kelly Quigley

2020 Poetry Contest Honorable Mention

 

I’ll leave the city
__but first
let me stem
the bleeding
__of each moment
into its replacement

________gray shuttle running vectors
________ from point a
________ to point

______________a whole people

______________you know,
_____________________us

dammed from anything continuous

whatever world there is
beyond the world
remains itself
only by changing

______________________(Heraclitus,
____________________________take notes)

I need to leave the city
to fall in love again
with colossal night

________________________________________________night,
______________________________________________Colossus

kinetic in his repose

there

fronts his cathedral
on the cratered ground

but here
I am on the Manhattan Bridge Overpass
where
through an oval of plexiglass
the small sky is close as sweat

________I need to leave this city of static
________________this white and shapeless estuary
________________this tidal mouth electric

____________ __________
______________ ______________________________________neon wings
_____________________________________________smeared with noise

it’s a heavy light
like a cascade of lead
pushing past the gun

I’ll leave the city so I can drive into the salt water
______________limbs already a heap of water held up with paste

__

________it’s hard to say
________why I’m so impressed
________by acts of faith…

let me leave the city and I’ll travel
another time round the ball of fire

______________________signal of a signal
let me leave the city so I can lie

________lie just because it feels like the truth

in the city my breath
glossed on glass

in the city my overgrown greek chorus
stands blinking
sundays walks me to Pels Pies
orders cheddar biscuit
and a drip, oat milk

I’ll leave the city if I never have to fake
enjoying this modernist social psychodrama
called brunch

Inger Christensen said life is holy
but did she know about Columbus Circle

______________________I can’t write another poem in the city
____________________________about pigeons
________________________on pavement
____________________________in arabesque

__

____________________________yes
______________________________there are pigeons
____________________________but
__________________________made of dust
______________________________and hardly dance
____________________________and my poem
______________________________can’t lift its leg
____________________________to piss

______________in the city my poem is a misconstruction
______________of two words that both sound like paralyze

my poem in the city is the city
I slipped past like a shit
through the s-bend
glancing the whiteish walls
leaving
only
revocable marks

______________________________I’ll leave the city because I’m afraid
________________________________________but not afraid
_______________________________________ of being afraid

__Inger,
__life is wholly
__contingent
__on death
__I’ve never walked past the gothic gates at Green-Wood
__and thought about my own little slumber

I don’t see myself
dying here

__If I die in the city
_____I’m sure it will be
__some miasma
a unique infection
______currently
________untransferred
______from animal
____to human
__unnameable
______until on petri
__isolated

______________If I die in the city
______________ _it will all be too bright
______________the empire lights
______________fronting
________________their cathedral
______________on cement
__

so I’ll leave the city
stoic
headed
in a swell of black
absent breeze
toward woods

or I’ll just leave the city

for another city

 

Published April 19th, 2020

James Kelly Quigley is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose work has been published or is upcoming in Narrative Magazine, Nashville Review, Puerto del Sol, 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.

Jennie Jieun Lee is an artist born in Seoul and based in New York, where she moved at a young age. After receiving a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and attending the AICAD Program at the San Francisco Institute of Art, Lee spent a decade working in Fashion. She received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Pollack Krasner Foundation grant, Artadia New York Award, and CSULB Graduate Research Fellowship. She has shown work in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Brussells, and Milan.