Ann Chadwell Humphries
If We Don’t Risk Anything, Then We’re Just Here (2)
I catch the words and hurl them back. No more feigned
objectivity to seal ourselves apart. When hit,
we jump back insulted, cry out in single syllables,
tend the kerosene beauty of our animus. Pick bare
the bones of argument until our appetite for fight is sated.
Now the season requires us to harvest opinions tight as
head cabbage, turn over dogma and dirt. It is messy.
It is hard. We cut through tropes thick as a man’s arm,
let sunlight succor hope but weather will go where
summoned. We’ll sleep with our eyes open.
Poems by Ann Chadwell Humphries 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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