John James @ Cornelia Street Cafe 01.26.10

John James (me) will be reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010. 

I realize that I am also reading at Earshot this coming Friday, January 22nd, so I'll try to read a different set. I would love it if my awesome friends could come to both!!!



Please come out and support me...

and enjoy some poems! ♥ 



Cornelia Street Cafe

6:00 PM
Tuesday, Jan. 22nd

29 Cornelia Street
Greenwich Village 
New York, NY 10014

Cafe: (212) 989-9319

Me: (502) 751-3502

http://www.corneliastreetcafe.com/home.asp

Sample Poem:

For the Black Widow Spiders of Southern California

 

 

Because we go without a trace,

& there is sweetness in the mimicry

of transubstantiation, when I saw

a black widow dangling in the nursery dark,

her black belly, fat & red with the swivel

of an hourglass, reminded me of warm blood.

Someone called the teacher & she came

with a plastic shovel, scooped the spider

from the playhouse rafters

& stamped its lights out with her shoe.

 

At the chemical plant in L.A.

where my father worked maintenance,

he saw the spiders too. They bred in the hot dark – 

The male mounted the female from behind,

then lent his body to thrashing.

Once he was dead, the female would gorge herself,

nourishing the children with their father’s remains.

Finished, she would spin a sac of web,

plant the nest beneath the boiler

or behind the tool chest

in the maintenance closet.

There they would lie, incubating.

 

It is best to remain calm if bit.

When excited, the heart’s palpitations

distribute venom more quickly

through the bloodstream.

Soon the symptoms settle in –

Fever of 104°, violent twitching,

tightening of the jaw. I can almost hear

the molars grinding in the back row.

 

The last time I saw a black widow

was a hot day in Kentucky.

She had spun her web in the transom space

above the back door to our school.

Her legs were long & slender, & her abdomen thin,

not like the one years before whose thick bulb

of a belly appeared in the dark

as if she may have been pregnant.

I moved beneath her, scanning her under-belly

for a blood-lit patch of red.

But summers grow humid in Louisville,

& the spiders, they like a dry heat –

They fashion their threading in the San Fernando,

where the air is always hot, & the wind is arid.

Where smog grows thick, & the city spans for miles

beneath the missing & innumerable stars.