Since You Asked, I’m Most Alive in Autumn by James Kelly Quigley

Since you asked, I’m most alive in autumn. 

A beautiful spectacle of death 

and if that’s all life turns out to be, I still think it’s worth it. 

As a whole the world is unbearable 

but isn’t it nice that at any given moment 

someone somewhere is going to school? 

Everyone who wakes up in autumn is going to school 

at least for those first few seconds in bed 

when the morning is almost experimentally blue. 

I know it doesn’t sound like it, but I think that’s freedom. 

If I could, I would read more, worry less 

and since you asked, it’s my hands I trust the least 

because they have a power I didn’t ask for. 

Life is a series of choices we make  

mostly without realizing there were other options.  

Trying to pick between permanent rain and never-ending snow 

is like asking me if I’d rather be loved in a certain sense 

or to a lesser degree. No! Give me 

snow angels in Cairo and umbrellas at the Metrograph.  

I want to watch a movie in the rain 

during the most difficult hours of the day, 

noon to 2:00 p.m., when I’ve finished another ridiculous article  

like How to Connect with Your Colleagues While Working Remotely 

and I start idly typing out all of my goodbyes.  

If I was someone before this, please, don’t tell me. 

I have to believe the best is yet to come, 

so unlike a river with no beginning or end. 

Honestly, would you trust something that doesn’t die? 

And now that there’s fire, you know why I’m taking the bridge.  

Biographers, listen: I am not an American poet who loves money 

but a poet from America where love is money. 

A poet from America who sometimes avoids happiness  

to be reminded that he can find the way back on his own.  

Of all the places I might return to, I promise 

the Earth isn’t one of them.

James Kelly Quigley’s poetry has received Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominations. Recent work has been published or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Sixth Finch, Harpur Palate, THE BOILER, Narrative, Nashville Review, SLICE, The American Journal of Poetry, THRUSH, and other places. Say hello at jameskellyquigley.com. 

14 February 2022