he passed through brackish streets
filled with disintegrated rubble
and dilapidated homes unmoored
from their footings strung together
by sagging electrical lines extinguished
of power and children’s playgrounds
with rusted jungle gyms lonely
and exsanguinated of their frivolous
vigor like some wandering itinerants
living in hollowed shells of their
former selves searching for morsels
of food for his quavering children
who hadn’t eaten since saturday
and even then it was only oily corn
from a rusted tin can salvaged from
an abandoned root cellar at a
devastated farm with poisoned
crops sagging in their furrowed
fields devoid of any identifiable
forms of life not even cut worms
or creeping charlie or redroot
pigweed and just six days removed
from burying their swollen mother
in that ashy soil on the outskirts
of some backwater town on the
shore of some wandering river
populated with unmoored tug
boats and land locked pleasure
vessels long ransacked and devoid
of any human usefulness what
with the rancid water and rotting
fishes peppering the swollen
shoreline like some biblical
plague of epic proportions and
all the while following the circuitous
route of some meandering railroad
line in an unmitigated effort to
to salvage another form of life
in an undiscovered land devoid
of suffering owing to its sheltered
location between two preening
mountain ranges while carefully
evading those roving bands
of demented marauders
James has published work in Box, Hole In The Head Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Rivet, Prick of the Spindle, Midwest Review, Cream City Review, Wildroof Journal, and Raw Art Review.
