Flying Island

Before the Mid-Term Elections by James Owens Tonight the wind comes hard. A rainstorm scours the yard of summer's last leaves and beats about the eaves with force to loosen boards. It warns in booming discords that children sleeping warm huddle near such harm as is past all power to mend. Beneath the burly wind, I darken thought and watch, as weather tries the latch. James Owens 's most recent collection of poems is Mortalia (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poems and translations appear widely in literary journals, including recent publications in The Fourth River, Waxwing, Adirondack Review, Tule Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and Southword. He earned an MFA at the University of Alabama and lives in Wabash, Indiana, and northern Ontario.

Pond by James Owens I trick the scum to life with a pebble, and wonder, haloed by the water's trouble, will this carp, cynic and fat by its drain, still nudge among these slimy stones when I am perfected to naked bones, softening beneath the caustic rain? The wind, for only answer, harries a rattle of newsprint into the trees. Rutting dragonflies twist in couples, green as rotting bronze, and kiss their doubles. Bold again after a minute's quiet, the fertile frogs yell themselves hoarse by scraps of garbage, a discourse on their tadpoles' choreography. Old car batteries seep and bubble. The slow carp oozes through mud, mud-fleshed owner of the lower sludge, easing past broken bottles to draw little prey within the vacuum of its jaw. About James Owens: His most recent collection of poems is Mortalia (FutureCycle Press, 2015). His poems, stories, and translations appear widely in literary journals, including public...

The Past by James Owens Refugees from that doomed country, we huddle around a few smuggled objets d’art : Grandfather’s insistence on his old-fashioned razor, that day flying kites on the sea cliffs, baths together when we were newlyweds, meaning the bronze curve of hips, at last a loss of control. Now, a breathing world whispers each day burned into the waves. We grasp the tension between contempt for causality and love of form, the suave gradient toward chaos. Sunsets beat a long pulse at our wrists, the warm rocking that landed us here. The moon comes shimmering, that brilliant scar. Bio: James Owens's most recent collection of poems is Mortalia , from FutureCycle Press. His poems, stories, translations, and photographs have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Superstition Review, Kestrel, and The Stinging Fly, among others. He lives in Wabash, Indiana.

Walking the Highway Back Into Town by James Owens                  --Michigan City, Indiana., July, 2015 Insects unstitch bodies in the weeds: a possum on its back, the pads of its feet turned up pink, an infant's supplicant palms; a fresher possum, draped with a fertile tangle of black and green flies; a raccoon simplified by heat and time to a tattered pelt and a snarl twisted to bite the tires that killed it. Drivers honk or yell, not to warn but telling the happy news that they are riding --- traffic from the casino that simmers with money like fortunate blood --- while others trudge in sweat and mosquitoes, among the slain, displaced and liable to damage. Then the poor streets. Young men glare, astonished by their own rage. Sticky children plague a sulking, blotch-faced woman who clouts one from a chipped porch. The white-haired, drunken man spi...

Even This World Is Enough When Starlings Shimmer on the Grass by James Owens First dawnlight imagines my hands out of the dark, this ache to press the air scrubbed after last night’s storm aside like a door. And all have risen in sleep. We ply out into the sky, gliding, hovering, climbing again as if we loved the far moon --- until the body tugs, insists on the earth, and the dreamer turns, spirals, regains the muddy shell and casts about for a word to crack open the dark, for threshold in the tongue of angels. Bio: Two books of James Owens's poems have been published: An Hour is the Doorway (Black Lawrence Press) and Frost Lights a Thin Flame (Mayapple Press). His poems, stories, translations, and photographs appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Cresset, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Stinging Fly. He lives in Wabash, Ind.

Dandelion Is not only the buttery froth of bloom, strut and defiance and sex, pulse, sap, heads one morning in the grass, eager little sun-warm erections, nor yet the gray spiritual fluff clocks, sketching their skeletal longing away from the earth, that shiver toward the wind and go, but the downward clot of root, unkillable, fibrous, that sucks wet from the dirt, breaks upward, digs in like teeth and chews the stone. —by James Owens Bio: Two books of James Owens's poems have been published: An Hour is the Doorway (Black Lawrence Press) and Frost Lights a Thin Flame (Mayapple Press). His poems, stories, translations, and photographs appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Cresset, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Stinging Fly. He lives in Wabash, Ind.

[I dreamed you were dreaming of me] by James Owens           —after Andreea Ghita I dreamed that you were dreaming of me I was at once full of deer and foxes don’t come near I cried to you over my shoulder, laughing, but my arms were already moving through sleep that you refused to disavow too late , you said don’t you see, on my back arched into spring, their claws have twisted, seeking my mute blood . Bio: Two books of James Owens's poems have been published: An Hour is the Doorway (Black Lawrence Press) and Frost Lights a Thin Flam e (Mayapple Press). His poems, stories, translations, and photographs appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Cresset, Poetry Ireland Review, and The Stinging Fly. He lives in Wabash, Indiana.