The party is a disco ball atop deep gloom. I watch it heaving darkly with taboo above the rim of my pink paloma: our host buzzing from group to group, her husband making drinks, the party stretched between them as a thing that together they are holding up, that we all are, to the deities of subtext, offering. The patio is a quivering lair of acquaintance, loom of repartee. The stakes are low the stakes are high when I make a failed remark and go inside, soon to see our host collide with the sliding glass door and think, it is good. There is a thing the party strives to achieve, a thesis whose proximity with our tipsiness grows. It will in all safety elude us, though not go undiscerned, will carry in the shape of murmurings secret knowings to the child awake in an adjacent room, whose recourse to synesthesia I now invoke.
Kelly Egan’s poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Laurel Review, RHINO, Denver Quarterly, Luna Luna, BlazeVOX, White Stag, and elsewhere. Her manuscript was recently a finalist in the Midwest Chapbook Contest. She lives in San Francisco and has an MFA in Poetry from Saint Mary’s College of CA. She likes to think about outer space and visit small towns.
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