New Poetry from Alison Hicks: “I Took A Walk With A Friend” and “Untitled”

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.)