Tom C. Hunley
Summer 2025 | Poetry
New Year’s Resolutions
To stand among trees
so still that they accept me
and agree to serve as jurors
should I ever stand trial.
To listen to one lone bird
close enough to mend
its broken wing, its wounded song.
To stare at a canvas until
every frail brush stroke
stares back at me
and holds my gaze.
To laugh from the belly,
a drink rushing inside my veins,
until I feel sunlight as it floods a stone
and wind as it reddens my face.
To feel, to feel, to fall,
and then to stand up again
along with the hairs on the back of my hands,
and walk into the wind,
my unzipped coat a parachute
to bring me back down, soft,
should I begin to float away once more.
Tom C. Hunley is the author of eight full-length collections, eight chapbooks, two textbooks, and two produced films. He and his wife of twenty-nine years have four amazing kids. Tom’s partially disabled now with a degenerative bone disease, but he enjoys living anyway. Sometimes he fronts rock bands. Right or wrong, he believes he has impeccable taste when it comes to literature, film, music, and the one woman who has his whole heart. He seriously lacks inner resources, and he’s almost certain that his liver is diseased. He despises generative AI, groupthink, the tortured language of propaganda, big government, and bloated bureaucracies, especially in universities. He has published poems in journals with names beginning with every letter of the alphabet, from Atlanta Review to Zone 3.