Joseph Giglio
but I can feel its fingers dripping down my spine, breath hanging on my neck, I stare straight into the middle distance on the long drive back home and try not to breathe until it finishes washing over me, until it finds what it wants behind my eyes, in my back pocket, and exits through the rear window.
A professor told me I’m the type of person that just lets things happen to them. A half-soaked paper boat on a bad day at sea being tossed, sloshed, downed as the tides decide.
The sky must have been red this morning.
I’m only five minutes outside the trail, only five minutes outside of our conversation where I earnestly thanked someone, not God, that I hadn’t accidentally gotten here two years too early. And you agreed. And I believed in destiny as something other than foreboding strings and an early grave. But here I am already seeing all the ways the world doesn’t work out for me crystalizing on the horizon, trying to remember I’m the one driving.
Joseph V. Giglio is a queer poet originally from Western New York. He has been previously published in Corvus Review, Dead Fern Press and HAD amongst others and received his MFA from George Mason University. He is often somewhere he shouldn’t be looking for birds or ghosts, but never bird ghosts.
