James Babbs- Three Poems

James Babbs continues to live and write from the same small Illinois town where he grew up.  He has published hundreds of poems over the past thirty years and, recently, a few short stories.  James is the author of Disturbing The Light(2013) & The Weight of Invisible Things(2013).

My Mother Was a Night Owl

Monday night and

I’m lying in my bed

eating slices of cold pizza and

watching back to back

reruns of Law & Order

this TV belonged to my mother

but after she died

I brought it home with me

and put it in the bedroom

my mother was a night owl

when I was growing up

I’d awaken

in the middle of the night and

make my way to the bathroom

and she’d be in the living room

without any lights on

watching TV

I remember she liked watching

reruns of The Waltons

Little House on the Prairie

and action movies

starring Sylvester Stallone

The Third Beer

when she got home

I was in the middle of the third beer

she just looked at me

and all she said was

oh

I said

thank god it’s Friday

and raised the bottle over my head

she laughed

it’s only Thursday she said

and went to change her clothes

I finished the beer

then got another one

it’s Friday I said

when she came back into the room

she shook her head

no it’s not she said

are you sure

I asked her

she showed me the calendar

with the windmills on it

the one she got from the bank

then verified it

by handing me her phone

I kept drinking the beer

shit I said

I guess I lost a day somewhere

she laughed

oh well she said

before walking into the kitchen

then coming back with two more beers

she handed one of them to me

then she took a seat

next to me on the couch

Lincoln’s Birthday

I started driving home

a couple of hours after midnight

traveling out on

the dark highway alone

coming up from the south

and I kept seeing wisps of fog

like ghosts dancing

at the edges of my headlights

and it started raining

just outside of Springfield

while I scanned through

stations on the radio

before landing on some jazz

and I thought about a woman

I once knew long ago

who had the same birthday

as Abraham Lincoln

and I remembered

how I tried to tell her

he was our 16^th president

and how he freed the slaves

by signing

the emancipation proclamation

but she just laughed

and kept shaking her head

telling me over and over again

how she was never a good student

and she really didn’t know

much about history