February 2022
Bio Note: Lately, most of the snow where I live in West Michigan comes in January and February and stays well into March. But who knows what might happen this time around. In any case, these poems react to my perennial longing for winter simply to end, especially this time around as I head for May retirement after nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies. I live in the snowy woods near Saugatuck, Michigan, and my tenth collection, Mobius Trip, dropped in October 2021 from Dos Madres Press.
Faux Thaw
If ever a day so deceitful, so promising in its delicate sunshine, you’d stow all the wools and flannels, change out storms for screens—the mud-framed sidewalks, matted gardens so bathed in clemency you’d stamp COMMUTED on the calendar and free those squirmy inmates from their times-sevens and prepositions to make a giddy getaway into rumpus rooms of blue and wispy white—today’s that kind of day.
Originally published in Silver Stork
©2022 D. R. James
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