Jim Davis

Man Kissing Boobs


Evening exhale of A. Finkl & Sons
steel smog, enhancing the North
Chicago sunset, and whatever it is

they use to tan the leather
at the Webster leather-stretch: Famous
Horween tannery smells like a golf course

outhouse, the neighbor’s dead cat
blankets – mechanic-me, why can’t I
look at a radio and tell the cloud to break

from a web of ostensible unphasing, street-
tough? Break, you beautiful storm, snap
like an aloe stem, juice me, rid me of that

city-stink, at least push it deeper down.
Pequod’s Pizza, where I learned new words
on the bathroom wall, contributed too.

Amazed by the electro-gas twisting
of halogen tubes, a purple whale balanced
on one fin, draught mug frothing in the other –
the start of parts becoming parts, symbol
soup, lewd collection of letters and limbs
crudely sketched. The intersection of boyhood

and everything else, where our waitress perked
through her shirt, where I ached out my first
pornography on the wall with a felt tip pen.

Tales of the Jazz Age


Ravenous within the bounds of business, the reproach
of two gerbils in a cage, how hungry she must have been
to eat her mate. How many lives have I ruined? One
doubled in size overnight, the other became, by some gift
of this universal business, nothing more than a tail and some bones.

Sucking on silver polish in a room full of candles, fickle wicks,
a young boy draws the Predator’s meaty tusks and whiskers
reads a word like preemptor two times in the footprint of a page –
how selfish the seizure of privacy in the intimate, how he prefers
the large intimacy of a party, men in bowties with lampshades

dulling the wan light of waning smiles. Indecency swings
from the chandelier. What ostensible parts asunder could be
worse than lightning pulled apart from its thunder? Forced to live
in the flash of trees falling alone in a forest – who can be sure
what’s been stolen won’t tear itself to pieces in the desperate

hope to find itself again? There are far greater times to be had
he assumes, sniffing the air for sawdust as a young boy
reads Gatsby in the basement, two gerbils squirreling in a cage.
Rancid, Black Flag, Operation Ivy, naive to the imminent
consumptions: crimson woodchips, lovesickness, small stack of bones.

Driving with Pizzelles

               for Michael Earl Craig


I have been known to bring snakes to the revival tent.
I’m trying on hats in the handcuff factory / silk scarf stand.
I’ll stick this thing square in the Geo Tracker, Megadeath
rattling the speakers. There once was a sort of music.

I’m in the lane to go left, steering with my knee, go straight,
trying to open a package of lemon zest pizzelles with one hand
and my teeth, checking cell reception, spitting gum out the window.
I am decorating my future motel room. A fat white Chevrolet

pulls up to pass, cannot, pulls back and signals he’ll put a bullet
through the window into my skull behind the ear. Today a man
removed his shoes, one by one, threw them at the president. I’m alive,
thank heaven, because of the pizzelles, peeled with my teeth

set the pack in the passenger seat. The man in the fat white van
has a fat wife waiting back home in a thin kimono she lets slip
as she bends to pick the paper from the stoop and the neighbor waves
and wipes his mouth and says Hold on, I’ve got something for you –

they trade envelopes over the fence, mislabeled. Free radio
brings me news from Guantanamo Bay. A postcard from
Del Pabellon’s been through weather, cat-parts in the dumpster
behind the gyro stand. We live in a very sordid country.

I am trying on my motel furniture. I’ll rewrite most of the old poems.

Sunday Memo, Re: Joyce


Sliced almonds, dried berries sprinkled over steel-
cut oats at the window this morning, smell of thyme
from the planter. One small thrush pining over needle
placement: thatched sprigs and twigs of poplar, cypress,

hair and twine. The water from the tap is cold the way
spring pipes allow. Running over an apple, fingers still
numb and thick from sleep. After a series of bird calls
he’d like to name but can’t, he wonders: must he inherit

the strangely sound of consonants in Euclid’s use
of gnomon, as Joyce suggests in The Sisters
or The Dubliners? So too with simony in the Catechism,
captured, in a sense, in the same story? In thrush-like

becomings and shivers of rose bush, he is convinced of his
ability to extract meaning from abstract sentences. Venial
sun, sincere and abundant, thawing the planter of thyme.
Still the winter’s white truculence has done away

with those who came together to escape the cold. Still
and all he loved her, in a small way. Shock and awe dissolve
to the quiet reverence of a man running his hands over an apple,
buffing it across his musty lapel as the tree-line lays blue strips

of shadow like the blade of a sundial announcing itself
upon the lawn like the sacraments of Joyce given
to those willing to listen. Dun-colored morning, coffee sipped,
stirring oats and working a new apple down to its core.


Ephemera


                                    Healthy children will not fear life
                                    if their elders have integrity enough
                                    not to fear death.
                                                                  - Erik Erikson

I used to know the story of why the grass grows
greener on the hill below the abbey.

What’s kept in a box and buried
under a child’s trundle bed, secret
Hushpuppy shoebox of treasures, becoming
the old Guillen Cigar tin of taboos, collected

matchbooks, beer tabs, Pamela Anderson beaming
in a windblown sundress, unused prophylactics:
a slapdash catalogue of Eriksonian industries, and guilt.
The best and worst things are often unforeseen.

There are those we cannot name or will not, swirling
in varied pockets of deep night or no-one-looking.

Swinging slowly in the swings beside the elementary
school we went to, she told me
what she’d do it she were pregnant, and had I heard
about the abbey on the hill? Young girls

took their unplanned blessings to the Abess’
commune to be delivered, then buried
silently among the gardens, flourishing
in emerald green, dappled with the cascade

of lavender foxgloves and bluebells
tolling omens of indifference through the valley.




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Jim Davis is a graduate of Knox College and an MFA candidate at Northwestern University. Jim lives, writes, and paints in Chicago, where he edits North Chicago Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Seneca Review, Adirondack Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and Contemporary American Voices, in addition to winning multiple contests, prizes, Editor’s Choice awards, and a recent nomination for the Best of the Net Anthology. His book, Assumption (Unbound Content, 2013) will soon be followed by book two, Earthmover (Unbound Content).

In addition to the arts, Jim is a teacher, coach, and international semi-professional football player.