I TOOK A WALK WITH A FRIEND

Instead of starting a poem

I told her about my son’s first semester
As long as he’s home & happy & in one piece, she told me

Worry squeaked out my sneakers onto wet pavement
The rest dissolved with the pitcher of margaritas

Though it was wet & rainy
I did not get a headache

Married for thirty-four years
We selected the movie about divorce

By the time we finally got to watch it
He fell asleep

The book was about a friendship that started in graduate school
I skipped ahead to the parts where she snorted OxyContin

Didn’t want to think about graduate school
But stayed up reading the juicy parts anyway

Personally, I blame the recliner

UNTITLED

The sea is a room without walls. It spills, falling over land. Land shears away into sea,
rooms echo with spills and falling walls. Walls are powerless in the war of land and
water, swells uproot trees, sweep cars, shopping carts, diamond necklaces out to sea,
rooms of plastic ingots drifting down. The sea has room, gathering spoils from falling lands.

(UNTITLED is included in Hicks’ new book Knowing Is A Branching Trail, winner of the 2021 Birdy Prize and forthcoming in mid-September from Meadowlark Books.)

Alison Hicks

Alison Hicks’s forthcoming book of poems, Knowing Is a Branching Trail, won the 2021 Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Books, and is forthcoming in September, 2021. Previous books include poetry collections You Who Took the Boat Out and Kiss, a chapbook Falling Dreams, a novella Love: A Story of Images, and an anthology, Prompted. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Permafrost, and Poet Lore, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Green Hills Literary Lantern. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.