James Cushing

Sunset Boulevard                                                          

            1.

How many times have we watched

this movie? We prove our love for it

by attending to its tiny details:

the slightly raised voice, the crepe collar,

the black dot in the corner that indicates

an imminent reel change. Maybe

we want to know it the way an ox

knows the cart it hauls. Maybe we want

to consume it, swallow until it’s nothing

but papers scattered on a floor.

            2.

The movie is a swimming pool

where I told you I would meet you,

with a view of the sycamores we liked,

and now that we’re under its water,

I feel encouraged. Spring must be

coming soon. You and I have

already become two sycamores planted

in the swimming pool, and we must

pause a moment, becoming 

human again. The bedroom door is open,

both bed and chair wait empty,

my reading glasses sit on top of a book.

I turn now and point to

the surface of the pool,

its scenes of blooming white

refractions loose and steady.

In the house, the bedroom

doors have no locks, no knobs.

There’s an unexplained jewel

in everything, and

neither of us can shut our eyes

to what its dream brings —

what candles, what warnings.

            3.

The movie was made when citizens

found personal meaning in asteroid

trails crossing the night sky. In

scene after scene, we feel as if

we’re jumping from a plane, yanking

open our parachute, rising a bit

on the air before descending. 

And then, we pat our hair and our lips,

trade in our old scratched

glasses for clearer ones, wave back 

at the nest we have abandoned.

When we feel cruel, we regret our past.

for Jan Wesley, 1960-2025

Sudden Unnatural Brightness

The soaked book’s pages have

gotten stuck together, hiding all

the addresses and numbers I needed.

As a result, I’m trapped here:

the day has turned into

a hitchhiker, standing in the

rain beside a highway, his desire

for a warm dry ride holding him

tightly. I know what his shoes

are telling him, and what

the long fields of spider-filled thistle

have yet to tell him — that soon

night will be hissing around him,

a driver will give way to curiosity,

and he will sit on a dry, upholstered

seat, his patience having landed,

done its work. Still, the pages

in my book are blocks of ruined paper.

As I try to open them, each

one breaks into pieces in my hand,

and I touch my forehead with

one broken piece. The inky paper

looks like discolored meat,

and I suddenly know I am

the hitchhiker, the coarse-faced man

trespassing in this wet library,

alert to the hands that grab ankles,

the belt that scowls. I hear

a faucet, then I see a light.

When My Daughter Called                                          

I love reading Denise

Duhamel’s Pink Lady and

David Trinidad’s “Classic Layer

Cakes” because Denise and David

had mothers who clearly loved them,

and these poems magnify that love

while lifting it up into the tragic context

of loss and death,

but these poems also cause me

sadness and envy, because

by the time I tuned 35, more

than half my life ago now,

my own mother’s alcoholism

had so completely taken over that

she was no longer capable of love,

so I had to cut her out of my life,

and for her last ten years on earth

we did not see one another or speak,

and the late April morning when she died,

we were living 3000 miles apart,

and when my daughter called

with the news, my first and strongest

feeling was relief —

I would never smell her bourbon,

her ashtray breath, never

see her angry face or hear her

bitter sarcastic tone again —

and I can’t make

a poem out of that,

now can I?

for Denise Duhamel