JAMES OWENS - POEMS

James Owens's most recent book is Mortalia (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poems and translations appear widely in literary journals, including recent publications in Adirondack Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Honest Ulsterman, and Southword. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in a small town in northern Ontario.

​Reft

​When through branches bars of mote-light
slanting heavily
 
and behind ordinary
things the colours
 
shivering in me a drenched
child, this longing
 
for a breath
to tear it all open:
 
sunlight beaten like foil onto the darkness
clean dust, clean wind
 
and the sky and
the sky and the sky

​After Kobayashi Issa

​Some weary nurse scrubs birth-goo from your toes,
then, bam!, they're sluicing death-sweat off your old corpse
--- in between: words and words about words.

​Escape

​The dog's bark at night
leapt from the broadest throat,
stretched its legs
like slamming four doors
and broke the kennel gate.
 
The bark romped on rooftops,
in gutters, growling under cars,
burst like a gun,
cracking dirty jokes, drumming
ravenous panic.
 
The bark echoed in alleyways
where it rutted with shadows,
licking smells from the air.
 
At dawn the bark
napped in an ear,
a shelter from the shush-ing rain.