Jim Davis

A Pair of Gumshoes in Café Kakao

                     Part Two: An Episode of Sweet Talk

The green detective is haunted by dreams.
When an apple falls, the earth moves to meet it
since movement is the complexity of mutual
attraction. Weight is a reaction, not a thing
unto itself. A sink full of dishes is an empty
apartment, a pool of spilled milk, or a carton
of painted eggs. It is impossible to represent
the fractured structure of imagined reality,
said Ben, reading a flyer on gravity passed
out by Ernst Mach, before he went down
to the cellar for a can of soup & chipmunks
chewed his feet. She heard his fitful cries
& stood to set a book on the shelf, rinsed her
wineglass in the sink & set it on the rack to dry.

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Blue Monk

Thelonious wrote lyrics inside a moleskin
while sitting in rush hour traffic. Downwind
from the steel factory there’s a river of cats
teeming with bacteria programed to eat
the minds of rats who go dumb with happiness.
Ravens above the billboard lady. Siamese
tennis shoes hung from the telephone wire
tremble as a girl tells her man she’s unhappy –
sitting in the bathtub, she sticks a finger
through the buttonhole of her new man’s acid  
washed jeans, 1983. I am not alive yet, but
I will be. Jazz always returns to the tempo
& jimmies itself holy, like the swollen cheeks
of a blue cherub, lips busy on a traveling horn.



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Jim Davis is a Master’s candidate at Harvard University and a recent graduate of Northwestern University. His work has previously appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Portland Review, Seneca Review, Midwest Quarterly, Santa Clara Review, RHINO, and California Journal of Poetics, among many others.