James Owens- Three Poems

American Naturalism

The cat wants

pleasure from

hurting the mouse,

wants to needle

his claws into

warm meat

and make the

little fucker

bleed and squeal.

The mouse wants

to avoid pain,

so scampers

into one hilarious

subterfuge after another.

Or maybe this

elementary calculus:

the cat wants to eat,

the mouse to live.

The children hold their bellies

and laugh their hairless asses off.

Weather

since we are

clay and ash

melded somehow

with the fire

old monks beg

god weeping

without cease

to let them

become only ---

look:

through the swish

of windshield wipers

this man beside

the road who cups

a stut-ter-

ing flame

to his face

hunched away

from the wind

Wind and Ash

This wind ---

starved rose stems click

in their cage of thorns.

Cold polices the yard.

Scraps of paper.

Blood shudders and hides.

This ash, too,

from Dachau or Baghdad

or some other well managed death ---

the kind that colors the ground

here and there

and here.

Biographical note:

Two books of James's Owens poems have been published: An Hour is the Doorway (Black Lawrence Press) and Frost Lights a Thin Flame (Mayapple Press). His poems, reviews, translations, and photographs appear widely in literary journals, including recent or upcoming publications in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Cresset, and The Stinging Fly. He lives in central Indiana and northern Ontario.