Looking for This? Two Prose Poems by James A.H. White

Looking for This?

A dog cries through the night because his owner has set a hedgehog constructed from manicured folds of cardboard on the living room bookshelf with a body reminiscent of the fat neighbor cat that brushes against the back patio ferns while curving her notables back and up. The dog believes the new animal and the cat are friends, plotters in on it together, finding themselves on the other side of the glass door where the dog usually goes wild. But tonight, he paces in front of the bookshelf like an impatient man with a question, waving his arm and snapping his fingers for the interval to call on him so he can ask: “Why is it I can never find a moment’s peace?”

THE ONLY LOVE LETTER I’LL EVER WRITE; A HAIBUN [FOR A HOMELAND]

Tell the spring sea

how peacefully

it falls over

the Pyramids of Yonaguni-Jima, whose triangular rock has eroded into arcs and curves; to the demi-stages of the moon’s cycle. The steps are a temple’s whose flat landings were once meant for praying and not swimming. When diving for pearls becomes diving for God, the mussels open to unconventional wisdom.

James A.H. White is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry at Florida Atlantic University. A winner of the 2014 AWP Intro Journals Project award in Poetry and nominee for Pushcart Prizes, James currently serves as a Poetry Editor for 3Elements Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Gertrude, Hermeneutic Chaos, Tahoma Literary Review, and DIAGRAM, among others. His chapbook, hiku [pull] (2016), is forthcoming from Porkbelly Press.