James Kelly Quigley
Bad Leg
the koi in the koi pond
are not to be trifled with
if there were no koi
in this koi pond
I couldn’t fathom
meeting you later for quiche
dragging the bad leg
of my heart behind me
​
James Kelly Quigley is the author of Aloneness, a strictly samizdat chapbook hand-bound in Brooklyn by Umpteen Triangles. Named among the "30 Below 30" list by Narrative Magazine, James has won the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry and been recognized with several Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets nominations. His manuscript Grand Blue Gown was a finalist for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry (2022), as well as a semi-finalist for the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize (2022). Recent work has been published or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, American Chordata, The Los Angeles Review, Electric Literature, Denver Quarterly, Ninth Letter, and other places.
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