James Bradley Wells
Summer 2025 | Poetry
Nests
Solstice stormgusts creak the stately Bur Oak.
Is this cathedral too perilously areal and candleless
to cradle my nest, my egg? Plains of Illinois,
still and alert as a doe, without a local
historical society, umbilical connections,
astrology. The village is not to blame
if teal-blue eggs discovered in a Robin’s
nest do not surprise vertiginous children.
Return cures absence, but without departure,
migration’s ellipses lack their eggshell magnitude.
One fist ripped me from the treebranch, another
fist pulverized go like an acorn. Illinois planes
are a where that wears the camouflage of from.
In answer to relentless sorrow, the insolent
world persists in being mercilessly
beautiful. Cedar Waxwing trusts these wilds
and builds her nest. What precarity clothes
a body in promise more than the fragile curvature
of bird nest woven with Viburnum twigs,
Cattail down, horsehair, and strands of yellow yarn?
The origin of being is well-being.
A bird nest is always both bird nest and image for garment,
home, and world ongoingly, the fork
of Bur Oak branch that cradles the Milky Way.
From real shack of Illinois birth to manor
of my mongrel devotions, I have become
adept at heeding the pulsebeat percussing my philtrum.
Whenever I gesture a parabola from standstill to sunrise,
Cedar Waxwing is the most masquerading
passerine that ever saluted me.
James Bradley Wells has published one poetry collection, Bicycle (Sheep Meadow Press, 2013), and one poetry chapbook, The Kazantzakis Guide to Greece (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Main Street Rag, New England Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Solstice: A Magazine for Diverse Voices, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stone Canoe, and Western Humanities Review, among other journals. Wells has written two poetry translations, Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) and HoneyVoiced: A Translation of Pindar’s Songs for Athletes (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).