Alison Hicks

  Homing
  by Alison Hicks

ISBN: 978-1-962405-11-97

$16.00 ($4.63 US Shipping)

Alison Hicks’ new collection, Homing, is available from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her previous book, Knowing Is a Branching Trail, received the 2021 Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Press. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Permafrost, Poet Lore and Sheila-Na-Gig Vol 4.3, Winter 2020. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.

DON’T ASK

me to sing you the future like a bedtime story.
Ask me about next week, I can look at my calendar.
Don’t ask for a vision. I’ll gladly consume
speculative inventions, enjoy them or be terrified,
balloons blown up with the air of now.

Don’t ask me about 2075,
nuclear silos, Vietnam, computers
on desktops, the internet, 9/11, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Obama, cell phones,
January 6, October 7: no one dreamed up that plot.

My mother came to me after she died,
and my father too, as a dog on the beach,
as if they were given that moment
the way you get one phone call
when you’re arrested.

Disappearing below the crest of the bridge,
running off into spray and fog, I’m okay
they weren’t here for the worst. I only know
what everyone does: the ocean’s getting hotter,
in places drier. Weather too unstable to hold

projections, what stands to be made and lost,
red ink drying up veins of accountants, red tides
in seas, insurance pulling out of the heartland,
smoke on the face of the sun, tears on the moon,
eucalyptus exploding.