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Volume 13 • Number 1 • Spring-Summer 2021

Alice Duggan

Inside the Boat House

– a rolled Oriental rug on top of a cushion beside
a well-built nest a little too big to be a robin’s –
and stag horns mounted against back rubber
pressed with a reptile pattern, waiting
on a table beside a leaning spade –

and there’s the boat of wood, a motor yacht
in fresh white paint, train tracks to roll it,
tight in its cradle, down to the lake.

The boat house I’m staring into –
two stories tall, The

wind blowing through.
Whose life is this.

Poems by Alice Duggan have appeared in Sleet Magazine, Water~Stone Review, Tar River Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry East, Nimrod, Sugar House, SAND and elsewhere; also in a chapbook, A Brittle Thing, and an anthology, Home, from Holy Cow! Press. She’s interested in dailiness, in colloquial speech, the rhythm of voices; in telling stories.