Poetry.
Selected poems and excerpts
by James Jay.
Whiskey Box Nebraska
I found first the scanned arrest record
for my great grandpa
through the genealogy research
to which I subscribed monthly.
Bad check writing. Sixteen years old. Nebraska.
The family had come down on tough times.
He only found the ledgers, claimed his confession
to the court. It’s not like he pilfered firsthand.
Buy of this what you want.
He’s not my great grandpa anyway.
He’s yours. Your family had come down
on those old and familiar tough times.
Whatever makes you feel better keep.
The rest toss back, so many tiny fish hooked
on a wide sea of bad luck. You passed those bum
checks, so you’d be in a tale, whatever the role.
Because you went quietly, the sheriff kept
the cuffs loose. The rest the evidence is my record.
from Whiskey Box by James Jay
Read “Burying the Baby Teeth,” by James Jay featured by the Northern Arizona Book Festival.
The Mayor of Kingman
His skin is like loose leather
or an oversized raincoat.
Shirtless, he walks it around in the sun
along the drifting dirt roads.
Children scuttle behind worn trailers
or flee for the cover of boulders in the wash.
They run up monster stories from the sand
and float them one on top of the next.
In waves, the heat climbs
from the only blacktop road around.
The sun bakes the tires on the roofs
finger press soft.
The mountain to the west looks
like a great feathered chief asleep on his back,
but beneath the brown, cracked rocks of the eyes
there are only cracked rocks.
A stray boy fashions the man,
into a lost grandfather who walks
to him with a secret
he almost forgot to give,
or a wooden ship
pushing through endless blue, a ship he’s seen
only in books, a ship now cursed into the skin
of this man who presses on in dirt.
from The Undercards by James Jay
Remains of a Copper Mine
A dull reflection of red, the side of the mountain
that Duvall Mining claimed wears a jagged space,
drawing up images of the spot on Jupiter,
like a place about to be named after a god,
then blankly abandoned.
The Industrial Park on a flat run
of desert to the east has stolen its name,
forgotten its god, borrowed a god, and become
fragments, fragments of associates that wear shifting
names like Tucker Housewares, Bayline, Ace, Home Co,
names that crawl across warehouses and truck trailers.
On Highway 66, men and women file over
to do the work of boats, plastics, barrels, glass.
The pennies in their pockets show only faint traces
of copper, and even the old timers stammering
out of their Fords are hard pressed
to tell you how they got here.
from The Undercards by James Jay