New Year by Rick Alley

Was childhood
your first
failure?
Remember the snow
growing so old
it was such a sooty
scarf?
When the crows came
to manage your grave,
when all their twigs were
   arranged,
did you think about
that Christmas
when your fever was
so mean?
Was that you who stepped
clean through me
in Trafalgar Square
last week?

Rick Alley‘s poems have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, Mudfish, Poetry East, Willow Springs, Graffiti Rag, Mid-American Review, Eclipse, Elohi Gadugi, Conduit, Smartish Pace, Ellipsis, Luna Luna, Electric Pamphlet, and concis.  He lives in Norfolk, Va.

Laura Lee Washburn Guest-Editor, is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize).  Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review.  Harbor Review‘s microchap prize is named in her honor.

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