James Lee Jobe

Look, there's Death in Sister's face, in her eyes - that's the poison.
Everyday she eats more poison. For a moment she is alive again,
...

A crow screams at me from the eave of the garage roof.
I wonder, does he carry the soul of the man that I slew?
...

The city is shivering, empty,
and looks like a model
...

It is an old man, ancient, with stiff, white hair
and yellow fingernails, sitting on a sagging bed
...

The man was dying, thrown from his truck like a projectile, an accident
in the driving spring rain, a dark country highway. My father,48, lifted
...

Six days till Solstice, and in the news there is nothing about kindness;
The war machinery grinds away, lives in the balance teeter and shake,
...

Charlie, sunrise is a three-legged mongrel dog,
...

The singing leaves and punted footballs drop, and the valley
...

Dad pulled his hand away from me as he turned to leave.

I can still feel his hand leaving mine, his skin leaving my skin.
...

Yule. A quarter moon southwesters in early evening.
From the darkness above, the lonely sounds of geese.

An uneasiness, an uncertainty lies across the earth.
...

It will be on the 11 o'clock news:

The sun supernovas! Everything,
...

My loneliness for Jerusalem is the stone wall
that holds me down, the barbed-wire fence
...

The woman became more ragged
as the summer wore on, dirtier, thinner.
...

I was born three thousand bumpy miles from here,
and with a different name. I want God to be a wild god
...

It's mid-winter and the sunrise knows it, and wakes me
with a shudder; I'm just a man.
...