Spring/Summer 2013

 
~ Poetry ~

                                                              

Bio:
James Valvis lives in Issaquah, Washington. Publishing for over two decades, his work has recently appeared in 5 AM, Confrontation, Crab Creek Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Nimrod, Rattle, Red Fez, Southern Indiana Review, and is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Atlanta Review, Catalonian Review, Crab Creek Review, Gargoyle, Hanging Loose, Los Angeles Review, Midwest Quarterly, New York Quarterly, Pank, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. A book-length collection of his poems is due from Aortic Books.

---

  

Your Face

I'm not going to lie. Your face is not a beautiful face.
Your nose is too big and your cheeks are too wide.
And let's admit the teenage acne scars don't help.
But your eyes are a very nice light brown
and there's nothing wrong with your teeth.
Your lips aren't that full but I don't like full lips.
Why in hell does anyone like full lips?
Are full lips going to pay the rent or clean the dishes?
Come to think of it your face is perfectly fine.
It just isn't the kind of face people say is beautiful.
And that's reason enough to like it. Even love it.
Man oh man, all those beautiful girls look the same.
You can't tell one pretty girl from another.
Even when they put on makeup and get tattoos.
Not that there's anything wrong with being beautiful.
Pretty girls are people too. And nicer than you'd think.
I just wish I could make you beautiful for a day.
Then you would know what it's like to be beautiful.
And I could walk around saying, Isn't she lovely?
And nobody would snicker so that I have to slug him.
It's a dream I have often when looking at your face.
God only knows what you think when looking at mine.

 

 

Mental Disease"

Love is a grave mental disease."
--Plato

Here I was going along all these years,
thinking myself to be a good son, husband, father,
when all along I was just another nutcase.
I wish I had found this out sooner.
I might have killed my father and married my mother.
I might have whored my wife for profit.
I might have murdered my daughter in her infancy.
I might even have drunk hemlock.
I might have skipped these years of love
and traded my happiness for the sanity
that philosophers are renowned for enjoying.