by Anne Perry
Joy
I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival. -Ross Gay
My friend Hilary wants to marry
joy. She’s a writer, precise
with words. She did not say fuck
or fool around with, she said marry,
implying a long-term relationship
with all its ups and downs, betters
and worses. Oh, and it was Ross Gay,
she said, not joy. But I know
what she really meant, how
a poet can bridge that tragic
gap between ourselves and
amazement, the world spinning
its rubble of regrets for how
we’ve wounded each other
and the earth, and we’re ducking,
like in a schoolyard game of dodgeball,
hoping to make it across, and there,
over by the chain-link fence, leaning down
into the sparse clumps of grass, is a guy,
just some lanky guy, plucking dandelions,
blowing seeds, watching their white tufts
float up across the field, the fences,
the rules of all the games we play.
Reminding us that all we really need
is a dry wind or a puff
of breath to lift us skyward.
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Published in Event, One Art, Poetry Northwest, and Whale Road Review, she’s won some awards (RBC PEN Canada 2024 New Voices Award) and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.
https://linktr.ee/nancyhuggett Instagram: https://instagram.com/nanhug Facebook: www.facebook.com/nancy.huggett.35 Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/nancyhuggett.bsky.social
Anne Perry, a former psychotherapist, brings 13 years of exploring the human condition to her emerging art and literary career. Now a photographer and writer of journalistic articles, fiction, and creative non-fiction, she focuses on the eerie and ethereal, human interest stories, true crime, crime fiction, and vintage true crime, with a particular interest in historical cases from the last century. Anne holds a B.A. in English, an M.A. in Communications, both from the State University of New York, and an MSW from Adelphi University. She lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina with her two cats.