Four Poems by James King

Halfhearted

            After Ada Limón
            For James

It happened, didn’t it? A human I knew
announced dead on the internet. He had my name,
too. A year creeps at the speed of a year
and it’s been so many since I loved him
I can only grieve half-heartedly.
I picture the heart in two halves
on a plastic cutting board, hollow as a bell pepper.
The heart with little white pips of feeling, extracted
cleanly with an expert knife. That knife’s this poem—
that knife’s the world. They say
the brain is in halves, too—uneven halves,
that whichever hemisphere contains your thoughts
contains your thoughts, designates you—
artist or engineer. Does the heart work
like that, too? Do the right-hearted
mourn in watercolor? Do the left-hearted
love like Pomodoro? This heart is reading
all the latest scientific studies, papers and names
strewn along the ribcage’s hardwood floor.
It’s been cutting its thumbs on every corner.
This heart wants to know itself. It wants to know
which half it should remember him by.

*

Controlled Burn

            “Massive wildfire burning at NC coast after ‘controlled burn’ goes out of control”
                        —FOX8 News: June 16th, 2023

From a ten-dollar boat
in the middle of the lake,
I see the sky turn hot,
plural, gray, let soft
white flecks land upon me,
the weight of an eyelash.
This flame does not rage.
This flame has only rediscovered
hunger, sucked the pines
like chicken bones.
It’s abandoned the usual ritual,
swelled its borders five times farther
than the firemen had planned for
and kept on growing, its own
small nation of ruin.

Whether we know it or not
we live there. I was not supposed to go out
today—it’s on the loose,
they say, like one would talk
about a criminal—but
I followed the ash, floating
like a cartoon character
toward fresh pie on a windowsill.
I must have lost control, myself,
but you can’t get this shit at home.
I drift, dust coats the water’s surface
like a forgotten thing.
If the flame does not care for me
I will not care for the flame.
I’ll breathe, control the smoke.
I’ll grip my paddle, become
muscle. I won’t wait
to eat up all this world.
I’ll burn my tongue on it.

*

To My Twenty-Four-Year-Old Self on My Twenty-Fifth Birthday

To you, who’s passed, ghost
of a lightbulb after it’s just gone out—
you will never see snow again.
Don’t be sad. There are some good things
that will come out of this.
This is that time of life when
there’s no greater gift
than having your teeth cleaned
by a gentle hygienist, roots
be damned. This is the year
when you find out
grapefruit can kill you,
with the drugs you’re on, and
what a life. Now I am at last
complete and singular, now that I am done
with the revisions of
my past, you may ask me
anything you like. This passive
curiosity, a chain on the arms
of my glasses—I traded my fear for it.
The color of the sky
is the symptom
you always thought it was.
Two days ago, when
you saw a kid with his head under
the wheel of a truck,
not moving, his friends
craned like ibises into their phones—
despite what you might think,
that kid was never you.
You are the one that drove away.
Will I ever get to stay
somewhere, you ask—yes,
you did once. Your whole life.
That was a bad house
in a good neighborhood, oozing
with wood ants and moss, rock walls
that snaked the woods
like centuries old-spines.
There is one inside your back
which explains all your stiffness
and pain, and a creaky empty house
in your head which explains
your general vacancy. Actually,
I lied with what I said before—
you are not so empty.
And it was a good house.

*

In the Carnivorous Plant Garden

Your new lover leads the way,
past knee-tickling ferns to where
the whole point of it is. You

almost don’t see the flytraps until she pulls back
the strands of thick grass, showing you
their tiny mouths, scarlet coin-purses.

Flytrap flowering is supplemental.
They bite but three times in a life—
all the rest anticipation. You don’t know yet

you will only make love on two more afternoons.
You just know the shorts she wears are navy-blue
and that she somehow loves the pitcher plants,

their mouths pimpled in sapphire flies.
It’s the end of season and so
the biggest ones are dying, crinkling,

tearing brown, papery holes (is this
what it will be like?) The younger ones,
purple, veined with white, still grow.

Five steps ahead, she says something
you cannot hear over the song
of their blood-colored flutes.

*

James King is a poet from New Hampshire. He holds an MFA from UNCW, and his poems have appeared in Exposition Review, Bear Review, The Shore, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. Find him online at jamesedwardking.net.