ELEGY FOR THE LAST TIME

                                 after Carl Phillips

by TA Penny 

Lately,

storms smell of childhood, though everything will

in this damp lightning         if we wait long enough. 

Spent in the day’s leftovers, we white-knuckle & street

lilt through sweat, alight as strawberry & worm

moons, edging & teasing

the dawn to show face. You’re afraid to finish what

we’ve started, to leave—

in the middle of someone else—tomorrow, to mark

the stench of this long dark             to be loved like the dog-

eared page in double shadow, Master and Slave,

or as a 2-year chip rubbed smooth, a scab picked back to red—

if I could ever [love or regret] you

again—a wild hollow where you kissed.       And yet,

yes—my god,            my mouth— I’ll wait.              

As ghosts preen across the wet sky, crowns of trees softly preach

the fast logic of night disappearing like us    eventually    underneath.

TA Penny is a queer poet, educator, community organizer, and collagist originally from Mississippi. Their poems and artwork have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Beyond Queer Words Anthology, Northwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Narrative, West Trade Review, swamp pink, Best New Poets, Columbia Journal, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. A finalist for Narrative’s 14th Annual Poetry Contest, the 2021 Princemere Poetry Prize, the 2022 Frontier Chapbook Contest, and honorable mention in Beloit Poetry Journal's 2024 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize, they're the recipient of the Joseph Kelly Prize in Creative Writing, a Distinguished Travel Award to the Tin House Winter Poetry Workshop with Ada Limón, grants from Poets & Writers, and fellowships or artist residencies to Monson Arts, Taleamor Park, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Peter Bullough Foundation. Later this fall, they'll be the artist-in-residence at Jentel Arts in Banner, Wyoming. Formerly an associate poetry editor for West Trade Review and poetry editor for Iron Oak Editions, they are currently the co-host of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series and host of QUEER SOUTH Reading Series in NYC. They hold an MFA from Stony Brook University, teach at Stevens Institute of Technology and Suffolk County Community College, and live in Brooklyn, NY with their cat, LB2.