January Gill O’Neil
Another Night at the Central Station Hotel
where the happy hour DJ spins
Billy Butler & the Enchanters singing
“I Can’t Work No Longer.” We kiss
the first of many goodbyes under
a Super Moon bright as a spotlight,
with our hot breathy mouths and a craving
for each other that lasts until our next hello.
On South Main Street, the floors quake
and rumble back to this train-station-
turned-hotel with its high ceilings and
designer retro vibes. We toast our parallel
lives with a French 75. He takes my hand,
the first two on dance floor, and pulls me
in close, sliding his knee between my legs
as we groove to Silk Sonic’s “Love’s Train.”
He gets me. We make our own joy,
which makes us feel a part of something
larger, this side of The Mississippi.
Praise our vast, unfathomable love that crosses
all time zones. He is not my everything
but he is the one I love. The way he takes
my hand and places it over his heart.
We pledge more of this, dancing
until the music stops.
Resolution
This happiness will not slip out of our hands.
It will not be discarded and tossed into the fire
or abandoned curbside like a dried-up Christmas tree,
brittle thing. It will not disappear
with the last string of twinkle lights holding hands
then packed away in an airtight plastic tub.
No, this happiness floats to the top of the world
as we toast and take our first breaths of the New Year
which expands and shimmers in all directions
into our cities of grief. Let us begin again—
let us celebrate the hope of making
something finer, something more.
Luck
Not an apple, or blue jay’s feather, or cornflowers
pulled from the stone wall near Robert Frost’s cabin,
but a four-leaf clover—meadow-fresh. A gift pressed
into my palm by a student mid-class, who says he finds
them everywhere. Overcast morning, and the ceiling fan
pushes hot air down on us. How lucky to be that lucky:
to find this green poem published in a field of sameness—
how lucky to receive such a rarity. There’s a one
in 5,000 chance someone will find this lucky flaw,
yet he finds them as if luck were ordinary—and maybe it is.
In the joy economy, luck hides low, waiting to be seen.
I hold these four hearts in my hand, wrap them in a napkin
to slip between my journal pages. Life’s lottery of griefs,
and yet—this clover. This moment. This small miracle.
January Gill O’Neil is the author of Glitter Road, Rewilding, Misery Islands, and Underlife, all from CavanKerry Press. A professor at Salem State University and chair of the AWP Board of Directors, she has received honors including the Julia Ward Howe Prize and the Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award. A Cave Canem fellow, her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and American Poetry Review.