Ann Chadwell Humphries
If We Don’t Risk Anything, Then We’re Just Here (1)
I catch the words and hurl them back.
No more feigned objectivity
to seal ourselves apart.
When words pierce us, we jump back insulted
cry out in single syllables
stoke the kerosene beauty of our animus
growl like dogs over the bones of argument
until
we weary, our appetite for fight sated.
Now the season requires us
to harvest our opinions tight as head cabbage
turn over hard-packed dogma like dirt.
It is messy.
It is tough.
We cut through tropes thick as a man’s arm
let sunlight succor fields of hope
with crops of new perspectives but
the weather will go where it’s summoned.
I’ll sleep with my eyes open.
Ann Chadwell Humphries’s have appeared in Jasper Magazine and on The Comet, the bus system of the Central Midlands Regional Transit Authority in Richland and Lexington counties in the Columbia metropolitan area of South Carolina (an initiative of Columbia’s inaugural poet laureate, Ed Madden). Winner of a 2017 Into the Fire scholarship from The Sun magazine and recipient of a Jasper Magazine Emerging Voice award, she lives and writes in Columbia, SC.
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