
Two Poems by Willie James
Car Fire
And so, delight and wreck teetered
in the late night, in the chassis
turned furnace, turned trembling
heartbeat of flame chasing air
for sky, run ragged from
the jet black it began to the final
charcoal it rested. Charred
now under night. And so,
delight departed. And so, delight
from the body trashed to flame
turned wreck, and smoke
mistaken for kindness of relief
(sleep coming finally after silence
of a day calling friends, calling family
recounting his story, trying not to weep),
smoke just goes, goes, goes
like a thick flat tongue that doesn’t speak,
that stumbles heavenward
with its incessant mutter of grief–
the undergrads knocking their thick soles
pavement after pavement, street
after street. And here, I am waking,
a shape unveiling its smolder
in the empty suede splintered
from the empty car’s seat, staring
to study what has passed: delight
into wreckage, teetered into gas.
Before Tomorrow
This morning in the quick
clicks of pen on your chest
remember the quiet kicks
of Jordans on their desk,
the quiet flicks of paper
in notebooks without
any notes. This morning
in this quiet, where time walks
like a cat through two
table legs, remember
your walk as they stared
away from you through
the words in their silent
reading texts they grunted
and settled toward. In that quiet,
pacing that classroom
where a treatise
of silence was a cracked
linoleum tile and a paused
clock governed a hope
and a denial that we
could all name this
as learning (it wasn’t);
remember in that dark
half morning, when you felt
like you were all by yourself
and you leaned your head
toward rain and stared
at a future growing its messy hair
into the soft hands
of an unzipped hoody–
how badly you had wanted to teach
someone about the world
drizzling down around you.
Remember,
in the weak lamp of this early light,
paused on a cliffside of bliss,
the pounding of that rain
and its urgency.
It’s all that’s left.
Willie James is a poetry editor at Pacifica Literary Review. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Breadloaf Writers Conference and WxW Tomales Bay Workshop. His work has appeared in Rhino Poetry, the Jet Fuel Review, and Peauxdunque Review.
27 November 2023
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