D. R. James
Recently retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, D. R. James lives, vegges, writes, bird-watches, and cycles with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared internationally in a wide variety of print and online anthologies and journals.
Here’s our current Winter spent in agony,
here’s our disrespected Sister, here is War
that mushrooms undiminished, glibly tears
our global Soul to slivers. And here We are;
Tonight, fatigue’s grim flower unfurls,
but Gandhi, gunned down, had this to say:
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
We wink at the crooks, our remnant like that
anvil we keep tossing each other, our
residue like saluting. We clutch the
banner of a warrened world whose tunnels,
unsolvable, incarcerate, swelter,
after supper he’d lift it out, slide it slowly
from its scabbard, jab it and show me
how the Germans screwed it sideways
to yank out your intestines—like a Canuck
