James Valvis

October 1, 2019

“Bee Sting in the Eye” by James ValvisPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, August 2019: Editor’s Choice

 

Photo collage of a bee near a woman's eye

Image: “Thai Bees” by Kim Tedrow. “Bee Sting in the Eye” was written by James Valvis for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, August 2019, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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James Valvis

BEE STING IN THE EYE

I’ve long said there is no such thing as a sad poem.
If you want sad, go find a disease or divorce. Go find

a dead child crushed under a car tire. Go find the bee sting
in the eye of your love. If you want sad, look at the soiled hands

of the soldier in Afghanistan, either side, or the hollow zero
of a starving child’s toothless mouth. If you want depression,

go find your great-great-grandfather’s grave under the grime
of a century. A poem walks into a room, says hello, and leaves

you to your prostate tumor. Go find the woman who knows
she should have married you when you proposed, and now

lives with the regret you never feel except when you think
of the woman you eventually married. Go stand in the rain

and watch how many stand at their windows and laugh at you.
There is darkness in this life, all right, but if you want to find it

you better shut the poetry book and stare out into deep space
where nothing presses in on everything to make more nothing.

All art wants to spare you from the bee sting in the eye by
telling you about others who have been bee stung in the eye.

Thus there is, I say, no such thing as a sad poem. For a poem
asks you to love the eye and love the bee and even love the sting.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
August 2019, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “Though clearly inspired by Kim Tedrow’s collage, James Valvis transcends the ekphrastic project in a way few others have, pricking its way into the heart of art itself. Go big or go home. Each line is as sharp as it is weighty. I’ve read this poem dozens of times and never get bored.”

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September 8, 2019

“Chinese Lunar Rover Finds Strange ‘Gel-like’ Substance on Moon” by James ValvisPosted by

James Valvis

CHINESE LUNAR ROVER FINDS STRANGE ‘GEL-LIKE’ SUBSTANCE ON MOON

I suppose most people, upon hearing this story,
think of The Blob, that Steve McQueen flick
where a gelatinous substance consumed
and subsumed suburban people in dark alleys
and movie theaters, before being airlifted
to the azure ice of the Arctic, where I figure
it mutated and dug its way to the Antarctic
and somehow became The Thing. But not me.
I’m thinking about those girls I tried to love,
or tried to date, or at least tried to take to a movie
back in my horrifying high school years,
those Jersey teenage beauties with their bountiful hair
held together by a hairdryer and gallons of hair gel.
Hour after hour they spent poking at themselves
with a pick that looked like a Jason Voorhees weapon,
teasing each black hair into place, naughty nuns
trying to line up all their thin rowdy orphans.
Because of this an average-height guy like me
felt shorter, towering hair turning four-foot-five girls
into leggy Geena Davis, who starred in The Fly,
another example of science causing trouble.
The girls mostly successfully avoided me,
their interest in ceiling architecture profound
in those moments I passed in the hallways
with my saturnine, hopelessly hopeful eyes,
but I had luckier friends and friends will talk.
There would be, my friends said, those moments
they’d try to snake an arm around a girl’s shoulder
and a finger would catch, latch, glued by the gel,
their ring-finger like some hapless fly trapped
in the viscous web of an already vacated spider.
When the girls weren’t turning us into Gimlis
or creating scenes inside seaside cinemas,
their gelled hair rubbed up against the roofs
of my friends’ cars, so after a date or two
large round greasy circles appeared.
I witnessed one of these globular blobs.
Sitting under it was to sit under an oily moon,
the dark side of a moon not much different
than the moon where those damn Chinese
are messing with things they don’t understand.
I think I speak for the entire world when I say
please leave that jellylike shit where you found it.
This is why I never go back to New Jersey.
Some things are better left where they are,
be they found on the moon or in the past.
No need to discover new veins of sorrow.
Steve McQueen is dead, Geena Davis
drove over that cliff with Susan Sarandon,
even The Thing would prefer to go back to sleep,
and I know that after fewer than four decades
almost all of those once achingly beautiful girls
avoid their mirrors like they once avoided me.

—from Poets Respond
September 8, 2019

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James Valvis: “When I saw this story, surely overshadowed by the hurricane news and whatever people are worked up about politically, I thought to myself that some things are better left where they are. And then I thought of The Blob. And then I thought of those hair gels the girls back in the ’80s used—and maybe some still do. And then I thought about how old we have all gotten. And then I thought, well, I’m sure some people are trying to save the world with their poems, especially when it relates to the news, but I have more conservative literary ambitions. I just want to draw out the humanity in us all.” (web)

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January 25, 2019

“The Distracted” by James ValvisPosted by

James Valvis

THE DISTRACTED

Even the best, most interesting people can bore me.
I can hardly spend two minutes talking to someone
before I’m thinking of something else. A poem, maybe,
or what I was doing when I was sixteen. I remember

in high school kissing a girl I’d grown bored with, 
how my tongue circled around her mouth like a car
stuck slowly driving around a suburban roundabout.
She asked me if I had important things on my mind.

I assured her I never thought of anything but her.
She was with another guy by the end of the month,
and I had the blues so badly I couldn’t concentrate.
I’d read a sentence of a book and need to reread it

thirty times. It took me all year to read Animal Farm,
and when I finally finished I failed sophomore English.
It seems that was but one of the ten books on the final.
I tried to cram but you can only read so fast while

looking out the window at rain falling like pachinko.
Sometimes like a stalker I sat outside the girl’s house
but instead of concentrating on her my mind wandered
to that pig Napoleon, and all the trouble he started.

Only once did she come out to reprimand my obsession
but by then I was already thinking about other things
and I wanted to leave, to go on to the next anything,
but she was having such a good time yelling at me

all I could do is watch her tongue move in her mouth,
which wasn’t like a car circling a roundabout, but 
like some manic bird who, though the cage is open,
doesn’t know it’s free, and so the bird never escapes.

—from Rattle #61, Fall 2018

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James Valvis: “I don’t know why I write. Or why I ever started. It feels a bit like asking a penguin why he eats fish. It’s just what penguins do. Still, I’m an unlikely writer, to say the least, a ghetto kid who preferred baseball to Baudelaire, chess to Chesterton, Whitman’s chocolates to Whitman’s poems. I think I simply had too many stories inside not to let some out—and not enough friends to tell them to. I have this theory writing was invented by introverts who didn’t want extroverts having all the story-telling fun.” (web)

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January 23, 2019

“Mail Call” by James ValvisPosted by

James Valvis

MAIL CALL

We huddled around the drill sergeant
like kids before a buff Santa 
and waited for our white envelopes.
Night after night nothing came for me.
No girlfriend or wife, family disinterested,
friends floating in the swells of their lives.
Once I thought of writing myself a letter
and sending it in the morning post
to receive it sometime later that week
so recruits would not pat my back in pity
before stumbling to their bunks to read
the happenings of things back home.
After six weeks of this, one man, Barr,
began sharing his wife’s intimate letters,
encouraging me to open them, read them,
smell the patchouli sprayed onto their seal.
It embarrassed me, this making a comrade
a kind of literary cuckold—before
handing the letter back, not having read
her words, only lipped them for his benefit.
But it was like that in the military sometimes.
People shared what could not be shared:
a buckle, a spare bullet at the range,
the last of one’s canteen Kool-Aid,
and sometimes, many years later,
in a far different mail call,
that man’s war death
as the nauseating news arrived
in a plain modest white envelope,
written in that woman’s familiar hand,
smelling of new smoke and old perfume.

—from Rattle #61, Fall 2018

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James Valvis: “I don’t know why I write. Or why I ever started. It feels a bit like asking a penguin why he eats fish. It’s just what penguins do. Still, I’m an unlikely writer, to say the least, a ghetto kid who preferred baseball to Baudelaire, chess to Chesterton, Whitman’s chocolates to Whitman’s poems. I think I simply had too many stories inside not to let some out—and not enough friends to tell them to. I have this theory writing was invented by introverts who didn’t want extroverts having all the story-telling fun.” (web)

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July 26, 2018

“Love Poem to My Wife, with Pigeons” by James ValvisPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2018: Editor’s Choice

 

The Sound of Wings by Gretchen Rockwell

Image: “The Sound of Wings” by Gretchen Rockwell. “Love Poem to My Wife, with Pigeons” was written by James Valvis for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2018, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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James Valvis

LOVE POEM TO MY WIFE, WITH PIGEONS

for K

In those days I visited a local park,
hoping something would happen. Life
perhaps, or a check in the mailbox

so I could leave the apartment where
I was not living, lights turned off,
only water brown in its unflushed toilet.

This, I knew, was the life of an animal.
A bird, perhaps, a pigeon, gray and ugly,
waiting for crumbs to be tossed away.

A cold, damp bench was my favorite
like a drunk has a favorite barstool.
At first the pigeons gathered around,

waiting, wanting what I could not give,
but as soon as they realized I had nothing
they accepted me as one of their own.

All day we sat in our stale seconds,
our connection made possible mostly
by our lack of will to do anything else.

The silver winter sun was a dime
flipped in the air by some bored god,
and puddles lay about like mirrors

thrown into the gutter. City trees,
bearded with frost, bent forward like
beggars begging passersby for warmth.

But the pigeons, huddled together,
sat stoically, as if inside them beat
small hearts like white dwarf stars.

Daily no check came, and few crumbs.
What did come were joggers and taxi cabs
that sent pigeons scrambling a few feet.

What surprises us, in the end, is action,
will enough to shuffle and endure, when
there is no other ambition within you.

I too felt this odd urge to continue on,
to scurry just enough out of the way
of tragedy, to escape the tires of bikes,

stones thrown by kids, bolts of grief,
to survive long enough to make it here
to your luxurious embrace, my love.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
June 2018, Editor’s Choice

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Comment from the editor, Timothy Green: “In a particularly strong month of entries, ‘Love Poem to My Wife, with Pigeons’ stood out for the authenticity of its voice. Sometimes it feels like all we want from a poem is one damn honest moment for a change, and this plainspoken narrative sings true. The length of its arc is perfect, too—just long enough to forget, by the end, that it was always a love story.”

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February 22, 2018

“Half of Everything” by James ValvisPosted by

Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2018: Artist’s Choice

 

Muse Laura Christensen

Image: “Muse” by Laura Christensen. “Half of Everything” was written by James Valvis for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, January 2018, and selected as the Artist’s Choice.

[download: PDF / JPG]

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James Valvis

HALF OF EVERYTHING

Half flooded by her advancing cancer,
my mother stands like a false Christ
who believes she can yet walk on water,
believes the pills she takes will be enough

to staunch the sea rising around her.
If she wears her finest dress and jabot,
if she keeps her hair combed and dry.
if she just stands still long enough,

hands folded, forever proper, civilized,
submerged table set for morning tea,
she can go on believing, as she has,
the world is only a fraction of what it is.

Already she’s turning back into the girl
who could not face my father’s alcoholism,
or her son’s sadness, or any deluge,
only clear skies and cumulus clouds.

If she ignores half of everything,
she thinks without ever thinking it,
her last half doesn’t need to go under
and she can find a way to fly home.

—from Ekphrastic Challenge
January 2018, Artist’s Choice

[download audio]

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Comment from the artist, Laura Christensen: “Before reading this poem, I had considered how water could represent a subconscious (amongst other things), but I had not quite imagined a place where one might place parts of reality they want, or need to ignore. Reading this poem, I am touched by the mother’s futile struggle for control. In my art, I contemplate a similar, but more general concept of quality and grace in the face of entropy.”

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February 6, 2011

“The Flies” by James ValvisPosted by

James Valvis

THE FLIES

That summer day it all went bad
a swarm of flies infested the house,
entered through holes in the screens
and settled upstairs in the room I was using
to type my novel. They buzzed boldly,
each big as a bee, black marbles shot from
a god’s thumb, grown fat on who knows what,
maybe the meat of my marriage, our decay
that stunk of death. So instead of writing
I spent most of the day chasing flies,
like a shadow I stalked them, sweating,
swearing, swatting them with nothing
but an open hand and the last of my hope.
In the night they were still alive
and had moved to the bedroom with me,
winged eyes staring down at my wife
as she pretended sleep, at me as I slipped
my hand across the soft silk of the chiffon
covering her crotch. Patiently the flies
scaled the walls, as my hand
pressed harder until she turned away,
groaned a fake groan, and fell back
into a new pretend sleep. Moonlight
slimed through the window. Nothing
was left to be done or tried but stare
at the flies, watch them flying
wall to wall, one mate to another.

—from Rattle #33, Summer 2010

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James Valvis: “The best writing advice I ever received came from my friend and mentor, Christy Sheffield Sanford. She said, ‘Indict yourself.’ This is mainly why I write: to hold myself accountable and to remind myself to live to the standard of conduct I ask of others. Since I seldom fail to disappoint myself in this regard, I never run out of things to write about.” (website)

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