James Bradley Wells

April 2025 | poetry

House and Universe

The single-story house’s flat roof would have been a wondersoaked site to lie and study clearsky starscape, but I remember flatness without below, without above.

And I remember, rather than imagine, how bruiseblue regimen of the old, lost house trapped us within, but memory occludes the dateless daydreams Julie and I lived in defiance of a realm where words portray amniotic vastness as nature’s hostile overflows, where the trailer is a fortress against the enemy’s attack when snowstorm unleashes its bestiary of windrage and menace.

And after such a snowstorm, wakedreams defy bruiseblue sleepdreams, defy the baretoothed violence within original house, where fondness for blueprint, plumbline, and spirit level’s bubble traffics in handshake regimens, where the magnetism between earthrooted home and skyclad world is unreal—

defy fistclench threat to weather’s together and animal pleasure in sanctuary.

And after such a snowstorm, real cropfield borders Northgate Estates, and further off, Deertrails beneath a skeletal forest canopy.

Silence is the orchestra of vastness. Snowtufts crash down from branches of Paper Birch and Balsam Fir. Footsteps thunder through milky surface of snow.

The sonority of silence, when snowfall blankets landscape in acoustic intimacy of armchair tucked into a corner.

Inside the skeletal forest beyond the cropfield, the crumbling shack would be hearthfire’s sanctuary.

More than original house in a realm of planes, envisioned home will dare to conjure universe.

Julie sees the toppled chimney alive with lorestitched duty when forest cottage shouldered into winter stormgusts at nightfall.

Clapboards and roofshingles merged with fractal surround of weather and forest, sheltered the merchant from his worry about the westfacing window that sutured inside and outside. He was expounding how to profit, what to do to get what you want from life, expounding the actuarial warmth of risks that sell well, while the snapping fireplace shyly melted the underlayer of snow that covered the forest cottage and windfingers smoothed the rooftop’s colding winter stuff into an icy cocoon.

Hope’s dormant rootstock of Sharpshinned Hawk’s nest anchored to cottage chimney, Coyote pawprints in snow, the chrysalis within transcends the regimen of blueprint, plumbline, and spirit level’s bubble.

The creature inside his cottage cocoon lost his habit of handshake logics, lumbered free to wander beyond planescapes, to wander below, wander above, and found himself endowed with a taste for nectar.

As seedcoat, cocoon, and clapboard cottage are inner sanctums of cotyledon, chrysalis, hearthcrackle, Julie and I lived our daydreams of home when winter snowplush blindingbrightly blankets cropfields and silence is the orchestra of vastness.

And winter-ready animals, we plunge into snowdeep and dig through the strange bright soil with our hands. More than danger of frostbite we feel the freedom to dream without regime. We claw a tunnel network beneath snowdrifts.

On all fours we crawl from one lair whose walls and ceiling we firm round with mittened paws to another lair we shaped from the inside. In our bright cave shelter from colder winds, we huddle in warmth created from fistclench, baretoothed givens.

I should like my house today to be as warm as our childhood sanctuaries of snow.

And lonely work, no profit, no blueprint, plumbline, nor spirit level’s bubble, to restore a faucet handle’s luster, to liberate the sutra of woodgrain from a coat of ash, to clear cobwebs from corner that augurs room that augurs home that augurs the silence of vastness, amniotic below, amniotic above, cotyledon, chrysalis, hearthcrackle sheltered within their sanctuaries.

The Dialectics of Outside and Inside

Thresholds write our memoirs, the doorways we cross,

the doorways we close, and all the doors we pass

without conviction. Someone in charge conscripts

doorkeepers who believe the them they exclude

is not coextensive with the sooth of us.

When windowpane adjudicates the edge

of outdoor and indoor, the unstinting space of Moonlight’s

halo enlarges the inward of lamplight soothe.

October via Largo Argentina,

with its Temple to Feronia and feline

sanctuary, I mutted around the streets

of Rome. En route to Piazza dell’Orologio,

I strayed past Pasquino and scavenged his adjectives.

Lunacy should be at home in poetry,

but few admit their Saturday morning nonsense,

sister and brother together building tents

with blankets spread among the living room furniture,

they daydream renunciation beneath Moon’s light

alongside sibling Birch and Balsam Fir.

I found myself caught in crossfire between Pasquino

and Censor Marforio, two talking statues of Rome.

Marforio twitters, moonshine is just a ploy

to famish craving to tame. The places from which

we are gated help us be the us we are.

Pasquino answers, music’s largo movement

melts geometry’s artificial membrane

between a circle’s inner and polyglot outer.

Marforio twitters, margins close the purebred

in and shut the mongrel out. Pasquino

answers, mongrel blood is multiply pedigreed.

Moonshine scandalizes stingy geometries.

The wilderness of retreat within oneself,

feral chamber inside chamber inside,

boundaryless within of spira mirabilis,

refutes Marforio’s artificial paradise,

the origin myth of inside and outside, partitions,

and other lazy certainties. The reach

of unstinting outside is coextensive with one’s

own inside. I knelt in narrow spaces

below Witch Hazel and Sumac, narrow spaces

amid Eryngium and Echinops. The more inwardly

I mutted, the further music’s largo wandered.

Marforio’s functionaries refused to stamp

a crane’s foot upon my diploma because I noticed

how the Mezzaluna garden’s honeyvoice

coursed through outermost branches of beinghere,

flowed through the stairwell’s silence from cellar to attic,

the forest’s silence after snowfall, the silence

that amplifies Panicum’s whisper and the press

of feline paws on ancient Roman rubble.

Wonderless horse’s mane emits no flame.

Marforio’s henchman only validate

the facts that shall toggle yes or toggle no.

In binary notation, lawful coordinates

may register unit one or unit zero.

Wonderless time is no longer just a Yewtree.

Rather than conform to henchman protocols,

blueprint, plumbline, spirit level’s bubble,

rather than toggle yes or toggle no,

when readers voice a poet’s exaggerations

as their own unforeseeable creations, they

enlarge the poem’s more than real halo.

James Bradley Wells

James Bradley Wells has published one poetry collection, Bicycle (Sheep Meadow Press, 2013), and one poetry chapbook, The Kazantzakis Guide to Greece (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Main Street Rag, New England Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Solstice: A Magazine for Diverse Voices, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stone Canoe, and Western Humanities Review, among other journals. Wells has written two poetry translations, Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) and HoneyVoiced: A Translation of Pindar’s Songs for Athletes (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).

September 12th

April 2025 | poetry

A group of college students takes a stroll the morning after September 11^th

The stripling season’s light – timeless but tirelessly untrue.

No matter – bright is that penultimate geometry felt round

a sensible world,

To which the goosefleshed credence of morning itself empurples

kindly waters in their wane.

A bargain of cold Providence and older daylight is terribly plenty:

Returning morning’s umbrage and forethought, warm,

to this place preluded not by myth, but color;

If it cannot be told why the elm trees shed themselves

before this year’s almanacs had,

Deepening their orange preludes

above the surface of the reflecting pond,

To which Boston Common’s swans swam headway

over the floating flotsam of.

Those human sentimentalists squat closely off the shore

And toss with penny-pinching gestures of charity –

Johnnycakes, cereal and barley grain, water biscuits –

To Boston Common’s feeding pool,

Feeding the swans, famining to and fro.

And we circled around the unassuming pond, thrice feeding

The swans into the hour of our unassuming business.

The birds circumscribing a world round

their unagonized selves. We wondered

Nevertheless when we shall separate this little meaning from

the heart of our own matters.

Down Boylston Street, one ordered toast and aperitifs. Another said,

“Tomorrow we will glad let our Cultures of Credence pass, feeding

the birds, though only they remain.”

This is all one nation’s unconscious knows:

What sad Sophocles to Churchill found,

having heartened from history to hearth.

This is all two millennia’s unconscious has learned:

Here and there looking on at cold huddles of the swans,

Feeding the devoutest progress of the birds.

Maxwell Tang

Maxwell Tang is a young writer whose work pays homage to the crux of being human.

Alex Stolis

April 2025 | poetry

Postcards from the Knife-Thrower

May 15 Vallejo, CA

Magdalena said, let’s forget we’re strangers

Let’s talk about ragged breath
gasps for air

Let’s talk about binding hands

Let’s talk about pleasure too deep to describe

Let’s talk about exquisite freedom of release

Let’s talk about communion when pleasure collides with pain

Let’s talk about creating a world, our own wide-awake-make-believe-reality

Let’s talk about flushed lips

Let’s talk about blindfolds
black/white/red/silk/satin/cotton

Let’s talk about a hand on throat
fingers in pussy

Let’s talk about nails digging into skin

Let’s talk about pulsing sweat and bodies
pressed tight against the wall

Let’s talk about us

I bet you’re in love with me now.

Postcards from the Knife-Thrower

May 16 Napa, CA

I grew up in a dark desperate sexy messy beautiful world, a Turin shroud
of pain. Lazy blues from an AM radio, a songless bird, dreamt of in winter;

an Indian (Native American/Indigenous) fable, a story with no moral, no ending.

Under a cloud-rimmed sky I picked at a hole in my shoe, hair home-sheared,
neck blood-red from cold and shame.

Train whistles came first, then the clack-clickety-clack of taconite running south;

a foreign language, the sounds familiar. Another unhappily-ever-after
punctuated in fists.

You were about thirteen, strawberry blonde straightedge smile, neon wide
lovely eyes; the world we conjured was precarious.

We were preached to, prayed on, and ready for iniquity but never all alone
in Gethsemane.

Woke this morning wanting you. A burning stifling need.

I miss the rhythm and cadence of you, the flash of light when you speak,
want to write your voice but have forgotten the sound of the ocean;

sharpen my knives in preparation for another make-believe battle.

Alex Stolis

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis; he has published poems in numerous journals. Two full-length collections, Pop. 1280 and John Berryman Died Here, were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Jasper’s Folly Poetry Journal, Beatnik Cowboy, One Art Poetry, Black Moon Magazine, and Star 82 Review. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press in 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres by Bottlecap Press in 2024.