min words | max heart
James Cervantes
Witness a hopeful face when the cancer
has been located. Surrounded, cancer appears
in a window of every other house.
The only victory is to deprive it of a body.
Think of ash trees in a front yard,
budding before their last leaves drop.
Likewise, there is no body, no thought
missing from a chain of thoughts.
A beginning ends what an end begins.
Borrowed line from "Twenty-Five Aphorisms" by James Richardson
James Cervantes's latest book is
From Mr. Bondo's Unshared Life,
a series of closely related persona poems. Sleepwalker's Songs: New & Selected Poems,
published in 2012, is comprised of 32 new poems and poems selected from six previous collections.
Other books include Temporary Meaning, The Headlong Future,
The Year Is Approaching Snow, and Changing The Subject,
a dialogue in poems with Halvard Johnson.
He was editor of The Salt River Review for thirteen years and is
currently Foreign Correspondent for Hinchas de Poesia.
He is also the editor of
In Like Company: The Porch &
Salt River Review Anthology, published by Mad Hat Press (2015). Cervantes has been publishing poetry in
print since 1969 and almost exclusively online since 1997.
What do you think?