May 2021
Bio Note: In two weeks, another strangely 3/4-virtual semester will end at the small college where
I've been teaching writing, literature, and peace-making for 36 years. It just may be my last—I'm good and ready
and more than eligible to retire—and for this non-techy soul it has made the prospects of retiring all the more
attractive. But luckily it's also May, whose refreshment helps me remember why I've persevered rather than dwell
on the slogging through. My most recent of nine collections is Flip Requiem from Dos Madres Press (2020).
As recollecting wanes,
I am carving out an effigy of Forgetfulness grasping mangled ledgers of memory. Look how it shuffles screens, kinks files: larceny of channeled retention from unmuscled thresholds and honed lingo. Its intrusions inhabit the vacuum. It hobbles the hinge of suggestion, the fulcrum of my textual clout. Like sleepwalk, pillowed and impermeable, it is ambling the clamped mansion of my cortex.
Originally published in The Ravens Perch
Springtide Ditty
Mascara’d vegetation bats its green audacity and amplifies the breeze singing through new-lingering day: cool-jazz suite backing the birds. Kinetic blooming. Keen riffling. Cobbled ruffling. Flimsy blanket-billow. Cavalier matins began the scramble under porcelain, moon-lit cumulus, velour milieu still cloaking my pillow. Resurrected spring re-relished refutes whichever well-heeled cons are in cahoots.
Originally published in From Whispers to Roars
©2021 D. R. James
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author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -JL