James Long
James Long’s poems have appeared in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Appalachian Review, Still: The Journal, Kestrel, and are forthcoming in Pirene’s Fountain and I-70 Review. A two-time winner of the West Virginia Writer’s Inc. Annual Writing Contest, he recently finished his MFA in poetry at Spalding University. Long lives, works, and writes in Charleston, West Virginia.
MEN
About a half mile from our farm in the bottomland,
before burnweed strands bobbed their shaman heads
over the creek, I could see Dean’s rusted camper.
Its rounded top, and my desire to see inside
those cold-eye windows formed a vortex
I felt every time he left. I imagined I was his
kid brother, in early seventies dreams,
when hippies trickled here from cities, to begin
new lives, meditating on oriental rugs,
dancing in barns. We always had chickpeas softening
in the food co-op’s ten-gallon tubs,
smells I can only name now
soaking my six-year-old skin as if I’d been born
from smoke through lavender arms.
Dean, the youngest, his curls blooming like early Dylan,
hoisted me on his shoulders when he came round,
swirling me dizzy, just like that globe
someone fished out of the trash. I’d spin it
to an island I loved touching on the literal
other side of the earth, a tiny place I called Tonga.
And when he stopped visiting, my mother
said that’s where he went. Tonga. I quit
dreaming I’d live there then, certain
no land in this world could hold us both.
