Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 01/31/20

Little Hymn in One Part

Andy goes weekend dumpster diving. Neither of us knows what he’s lost. He ignores the food but takes out cat scratched stools and cracked lumber. Once, he found a perfectly good leather dog leash re-used to wrangle passing clouds. Oddly, he’s not a believer in daytime rain or in the way Rome fell as explained by Gibbon. As you’d expect, he loves gas stations for the smell of the hot dogs they serve. His preferred fork was found while smoking at a gas pump. He will do a pirouette at any gas station where customers are generous with change. He only levitates when he feels like showing off. You wouldn’t guess he’s a gigolo and street mime, sometimes dressed as an angel. He lives off cotton candy and French fries. No one has ever seen him eat a hot dog.

©2020 Mike James All rights reserved.

Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee. He has been published in numerous magazines throughout the country in such places as Plainsongs, Laurel Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Tar River Poetry. His fourteen poetry collections include: Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), First-Hand Accounts from Made-Up Places (Stubborn Mule), Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog), My Favorite Houseguest (FutureCycle), and Peddler’s Blues (Main Street Rag.) He has served as an associate editor of The Kentucky Review, of Autumn House Press, and of The Good Works Review, as well as the publisher of the now-defunct Yellow Pepper Press.