James Miller
LAST GESTURE
We eat on the porch
when evening heat recedes.
Lamps hang from the oak.
The Conrad novel rests
between us—eighty-nine
pages left to speak aloud.
As you reach out for a drink,
we see a tiny frog, its soft green
curves still as summer, perched
on the lip of your glass. He leaps,
alights on the secret agent,
then the near-blankness
of our table, dry and smeared
with tree sap. Motionless,
aware. You offer a thumbnail
of water and he rests there,
half-submerged. We fall silent,
but miss the last gesture.
He is gone.
James Miller won the Connecticut Poetry Award in 2020. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Typehouse, Rabid Oak, North Dakota Quarterly, Yemassee, Phoebe, Mantis, Scoundrel Time, Permafrost, Grey Sparrow Review, Blue River, 8 Poems, After Happy Hour, Two Hawks Quarterly, Concho River Review, Sweet Tree Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @AndrewM1621.
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