National Poetry Month : James Hawes,

 

I Lost My Glasses



where are my glasses?
they are in the afternoon, in
the grass, lined up with chairs at a diagonal,
everything black out there without them,
—my eyes so weak I keep bumping
into things, but something holds me
up, something I wish I could see, it moves
so fast, so fast. get me out of here,
my feet are too loud on
the floor, there’s a pain in my toes, a
fish breathing in my throat,
here in my throat, a memory maybe,
she almost stood too close to me by
the white doors, now just a black hole in
the skin on this fish in my throat, this fish
in my throat that is breathing. the room
turns, I stay still and the room, the house,
the road, the trees all turn around me, she
picks me up and the fish stops breathing,
and I am here now, in traffic, among
the buffalo heading north getting back
to the previous conversation, to the time
we were smallest, when news was gentle,
our clothing on the floor, forgotten.
then a wire, my elbows hanging by it
I turn in the air, slow, an old vest on
a hanger on a clothesline, the string
just a point jotted down in the afternoon.
hurry, but carefully she said. I can’t believe
my luck, it’s lied to me so many times.

 

 

 

James Hawes lives and writes in Montreal. He is the author of three chapbooks: Bus Metro Walk (Monk Press), The Hotdog Variations (above/ground) and Under an Overpass, a Fox (Turret House). His first full length poetry collection Breakfast with a Heron (Mansfield) was shortlisted for the 2020 ReLit award. He is the publisher of Turret House press, a micro-press dedicated to new and experimental Canadian poetry.