Lucia Galloway

WICKETS

On a summer evening when croquet games are in fashion, a boy sent to bed for crying too much dreams of peacocks. He is a bantam rooster who can cross a lawn densely packed with peacocks only by passing through the spaces between their legs, much as wooden balls cross under the wickets of a croquet court. Wickets are no foe to Charles and Emma Darwin, who tap and stroke their way around the court with the best of them, and Charles knows deep in his erudition that worms and insects, deep in the grass find passages and arches essential to their own game--wickets of survival, wickets of chance. Peacocks will search and peck, trailing the fans of their gorgeous tails.

Lucia Galloway has published a full-length collection of poems, Venus and Other Losses (Plain View, 2010), and a chapbook, Playing Outside (Finishing Line, 2005). Recent work appears or is pending in Comstock Review, The Dirty Napkin, Foundling Review, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Poemeleon, qarrtsiluni, Red River Review, Sow's Ear Poetry Review, and Untitled Country Review. She is the recipient of several awards and prizes, and she curates a monthly poetry reading series in Claremont, California.