Poetry By James Bradley Wells

Nic McPhee CC





Pigeon Hill According To Sister Ignatia


Vicki says to get herself off the Hill,
girl needs a boyfriend. She don’t want to
end up teenage pregnant like her sister
got. Now she spends her afternoons at the college
Oztown, restaurants, shops, where there’s them that rattle
cups and them that sometimes hand out coins,
and sometimes won’t. But to get herself off the Hill,
girl needs a man. Ramshackle shotgun
house, on the porch that man drinks Jack from the bottle.
Next to him there’s a boy be skinning raccoon.
Garbage burns in a fifty-gallon steel
barrel. Bootleg timeline of Pigeon Hill
is moonshine, crackpipe, methmouth, opioid epochs.
Some of them fights you win, and some you won’t.
Fastfood job, drug court, Army recruiter ready
to take you down. You have to stand your ground.
Child prodigies prowl sidewalks, barefoot
and shirtless, a summer shellac of sweat and dust
coats their legs. They teach themselves to read
the cuneiform of situations. Supposing
you set your guitar on the stoop, supposing
you left a shovel leant against a tree,
sweets of pillage bank the coin of this realm,
Fear Thy Neighbor, currency and commandment.
Survivalist children, quick at coming to know
the ring-composition of the undertow:
make thy neighbors more afraid of thee
than thou be of them. No jewelry, heirlooms, paintings,
wine collections worth a fence’s dollars
in the Westmont Public Housing Complex.
The only sweets of pillage are Fear Thy Neighbor.
Flaunt your take with style. Cast the stolen
fishing pole with a practice plug in the street
for all to see, and coin of the realm lights up
the slot machine when neighbors fear being
your future mark. According to the buzz
of summer sky’s florescent lights, child prodigies
learn diagrams for fear’s assembly lines,
Rottweiler chained to honey locust tree,
pseudoephedrine chemistry, ammonia tang.
Pitch of limbs buckshot into the wooded lot
when police cars nose through Pigeon Hill,
survivalist children quick at coming to know
the ring-composition of the undertow.
Children tell each other the news of sex
they forage. The summertime man that fixes bikes
for free explains what sex words mean. He teaches
metaphor, how baseball glove surrounds a bat,
one kind of bat, but many kinds of glove.
Some like bat-and-bat or glove-and-glove,
you understand. The more he teaches metaphor,
the less these out-of-school children wonder what--
what it means when overhearing hard-liquored
men brag on the time back when they pulled
a metaphorical train on so-and-so,
ring-composition of the undertow.
Another summer more in want of love,
friendly group of boys and plenty of Boone’s Farm,
just boys who get you laughing at their mock-
innocent interest in what your pantszipper hides.
Supposing there is a fix for want of love,
their bleary persistence breaks that fix’s limit.
Squirrel nailed to a walnut tree
and pliered, another summer more in want of love.
Fight against the undertow, you drown sure.
So much perhaps depends / upon / a red
wheel / barrow, but if a tin can’s round ribs
contain the world, if sun and stars are sleeping
inside the tractor tire roped to a treelimb,
what opening is there for those whose circle
is too closed to the luxuries of a life
and language so uncomplicated and spare?

​


​
James Bradley Wells has published one poetry collection, Bicycle (Sheep Meadow Press, 2013), and one poetry chapbook, The Kazantzakis Guide to Greece (Finishing Line Press, 2015). His poetry has appeared in New England Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Solstice: A Magazine for Diverse Voices, Spoon River Poetry Review, Stone Canoe, and Western Humanities Review, among other journals. Wells is the author of two poetry translations, Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022) and HoneyVoiced: Pindar’s Victory Songs (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). Wells is an Associate Professor of Classical Studies at DePauw University and lives in Bloomington, Indiana.