Alice Duggan

Alice Duggan's poems have appeared in Sleet Magazine, Water~Stone Review, Tar River Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry East, Nimrod, Sugar House, SAND, Poet Lore and elsewhere; also in a chapbook, A Brittle Thing, and an anthology, Home, from Holy Cow! Press. She’s interested in dailiness, in colloquial speech, the rhythm of voices; in telling stories.

Longing for Sleep

If you soak this pan, the baked-on cheese will let go.If you put this foot down, it may encourage the other. If you leave the house, someone could show you
how the heater works in your car. The guy with patient eyes,at the station, he will help, and the highly reliable onestocking milk in the store, I need milk,
and the one who stops by with his chart to visit the brainfull of ringing alarms, warning my husbandrun for your life —
may he lead the way to sleep — to summery dreams,brimming with peace, the long tremolo of loons,the dark, still water.

Will I Fit Into a Cup

— the cinders smelling of me? Or I might need the space of a cardboard box, one that will moulder, leaving a mound of char, where insects I’ve never met, vigorous new generations, will come to examine remaining fragments
of bone. They’re immigrants maybe, newly inventing the texture of soil, and me not directing, me not controlling which green thing I will feed — the grass, the dandelions — the burrs —
We who are old, there are long words for what we do now:try relinquishment, try renunciation. Or just empty the cupboards,the closets, the drawers that store dust, so your children will bless you.
Is there more to say? Not much more. We can all study beautiful endings, as we prepare to fit in a box.

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