By D.R. James
PROMPT — Despite ...
Like self-exiles, I was proximal; I was blue spot-lit, gray spot-lit, somebody’s sector. I nudged slushy snow by nose and froze touchingly, concealed my seclusion like a cosseted crime. I snugged up to angles-cum-anguish, to double-crosses, to vessels and vassals, harnessed my gut, my groans. In vain I trained for inclusion at tables in gorgeous chambers of guilt, black/red symmetrical graves. Then . . . scrapped it.
D.R. James’s latest of nine collections are Flip Requiem (Dos Madres, 2020), Surreal Expulsion (Poetry Box, 2019), and If god were gentle (Dos Madres, 2017), and his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is free, fun, and printable-for-folding at Origami Poems Project. He lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan.