The July Featured Poet is James Rudolph

Please feel free to email James at: jbobrudolph1424@gmail.com

ON THE FOULING OF DREAMS

Past midnight in hours hardened
by the dark I am turned out from sleep
by a slow dream of soft horrors
a gothic dissolve to the
mute mouth of a deaf’s head
lips parting sluggishly to show
teeth like tombstones yellow sallow
in the wash of a sickening moon. 
I am awake again. 

In my dreams loss shows up like locust
in the flour sack blood in the cistern
love and goodness scurry like
attic mice in my fretful head scraped raw.
Sleep’s brown shirts sloppily maraud
wolfish drunks because they can be menace
the unclad and gentle the big-hearted ones
leaving them leaving my night’s rest vexed
and at sea.

YOU KNOW THESE CREATURES

They landed on Darwin’s reject pile
dark and greasy pods of squirmy misfires
devouring all within reach of their maws,
suckered and rhythmic,
this parasitic clot is a scourge
on the land, in the field, it blackens
where it sludges leaving trails viscous
with slough and scale these castoffs
are a sloppy business.

They do not seek to be redeemed
they do not come for absolution
they are here for the withering of
all things an anarchy of bent DNA
they pack tight against each other
a friction that raises a swamp gas
the metallic green of sepsis,
predatory.

They are among us
they are here now
and they cannot be shown a better way
they seek only the wilt and the rank
the decay of you and me
they smell of the backward, of sea brine,
of damned offshoots and mistakes made.

THE STIRRING OF NIGHT AIR

It’s a dead hand that reaches
from the salted bottomland of my past
its appearance ushered by the musty punk
of the grave this half-rotted appendage
of the grave is not in the grave. 

Sleeplessness is the cat’s paw of
my regrets this nightly shrapnel of things
forever lost or wasted wakes me lank and
rimy-eyed again snap upright at the sound of
nothing only to wash-out against milky sheets muculent
with accusatory dreams.

Contest these creatures severed and berserk
harrying from sulfurous holes contest their
free-ranging habits their indemnity for I will
afflict them in the small dark hours
of their feedings.

A POSTCARD FROM THE MIDDLE AGES

Your scrofula offends
bent-leg pilgrim
you trail shrines.

Liced leper you are
sanctuary for dark age
infections this rusted wrap
your skin warns and darkens
in soft spots.

So let your blood and
leave angel-pale a
doughy wafer clearish
in red sop.

James Robert Rudolph is retired after a busy career in health care and education in Minneapolis, having returned to old haunts in northern New Mexico. He believes in old-style magical realism, inspired by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the high desert, and the deep, broad sky of the American mountain west. Creatively he aspires to the crafting of work that expresses honest experience in beautiful language, complex or simple, as serves the work’s purpose.  

His poems have appeared in The Artistic Muse, Hello Horror, Mad Swirl, Black Heart Magazine, Poetry Pacific, and Poetry Super Highway, among others.