Cosmetology
I’ve led my final bible study and
just want to go before I need
another haircut, my mother said
two weeks into the three months
she’d been given, the last supper
of cancer swelling in her belly. Small
anyway, she’d been steadily shrinking
in inverse proportion to the growth
of her dogged will. Doctors don’t
know everything. This is going
fast. And a week later she was dead,
praise God, since the girls downstairs
were butchers. Ever see their work?
The Old News
wakes me from another manic dream
about my sons, 4 a.m., a solitary bird
whistling to no answer, news enough
that my night is over, day begun,
time to receive the old news—my father
no longer alive again—as if it were new,
though only through sentences
that circle like this one—circle
like yesterday’s drab cardinal,
who blended into the uncut lawn,
the leafy hedge, circling repeatedly
from another yard to the dogwood
to the overhead wire to feed her chick
who barely clung there, while the flashy
papa tried with his flapping antics
to distract me watching from the patio
as descending dusk enshrouded
my father—dozing again on his porch,
his newspaper unfolding to the floor—
who died five years ago last night.
—Published 20th of August 2024
About D. R. James
D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres 2021), and his work appears internationally in many anthologies and journals. https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage