Two Poems by Willie James

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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.

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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.

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27 November 2023