FRIDAY: You Ignited Me, All Her Jazz, Love Buzz

BY D. R. JAMES

The first poem was first published in Rogue Agent, the second poem in Third Wednesday, and the third in Peacock Journal. Copyright is held by the author.

You Ignited Me
You ignited me, all my dried branches:
your perch in an aperture up love’s lattice,
your wind rended me kindling, spinning and
snapping and ruining my stalks like slats
blastified, remnants of sadness then set
afire. How cowed by coma commitment
I’d been! But likewise you replanted me,
reinstalled me in watered cavities,
encased my re-emerging sheaves, ashen
indication of demise enlivened.

All Her Jazz

—after W.C.W.

My striking wife
is the cat’s strut —

cello sass
with a syncopated

escalator to
move

these languid feet —
Bet yer bottom

her fleet laugh
‘s enough to please.

Wham
giv’er the day

and watch’er de-roost —
She quakes my phase-y

ass with tympani —
Scoot it, Jimmy!

Ev’body
Ev’body else

and me —
We bop to it.

Love Buzz
The coffee’s made for, what,
the thirty-five-hundredth time?
Give or take. For a decade,
in four months. Love Buzz!
We joke, but that nails it,
and not just the coffee. Lord,
the buzz she brews in me.
Nights, too much streamed TV,
then the old novel I’m reading
dips for the fifth time. We say
“Click” when we spoon, the
ten-year ritual still a perfect fit.