John James

Catalogue Beginning with a Line by Plato

To the feasts of the good the good go unbidden.
Children’s hands in snow. Houseboats on the lake,
a red and yellow bicycle. The scent of black cedar
severed in its prime.
 
When my father died the nickel
wire of my throat
             collapsed, snapped, twisted in air—
 
hung itself
 
             limply from the column of my neck.
(It’s okay to play leapfrog in the yard.)
 
In the window sits a lampshade exhausted by light.
A man and woman riding home in the dark
warm the leather of their seats. A clown-faced wren
pecks bark from a pine, jams the acorns in a hole.
 
My mother slices plums on the counter,
removes the insides from their skin,
steeps lilac in a pot. The bubblegum
medicine she hauls from the drawer,
I take it from a spoon.

JOHN JAMES is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize (Milkweed, 2019). His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Best American Poetry 2017, and elsewhere. His work  has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and Georgetown University’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. He  lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley.