There’s a corrosive little wake when Queen Latifah flicks her wrist
miasming an omnipresent piano so she can turn her heart back to Eileen & find love in grief
or another day will come.
She conducts a requiem for Sarah McLachlan on her rhinestone-studded iPhone
in reverence of a dead dog on the side of the road until there’s an inferno of grayscale & one can only pray so far.
Sun Ra told me space is the place so I turn the volume up until the ground begins to seism
until this poem starts to autofiction itself
& I can’t quite make out if this song is about grief or America or magnolias.
Jack DeBoyace is a sophomore at Central Bucks East High School and placed 1st Runner-up in the 2024 Bucks County High School Poet of the Year Competition. He is currently assembling the first issue of Bridgework, a literary magazine he founded at his high school.
Poet’s Corner is curated by Bucks County Poet Laureate Emeritus Tom Mallouk and supported by a grant to the Bucks County Herald Foundation made possible by Marv and Dee Ann Woodall.
To submit a poem for consideration, email it to Heraldpoetscorner@gmail.com. If the poem has been previously published, please say where it first appeared.
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