James Davis

JUVENILIA

The spring of ’99, perhaps my happiest,
Mrs. Glasgow had us write our own epitaphs

for Language Arts. No one found them alarming,
our exploding bodies, our marginal

KABOOMs. Comedy approached tragedy
in the cafetorium. Together we gyrated

to Mase and Biggie in our fug of hormones.
I was a moorcock among moorhens.

I penned an ode to Sheryl Crow, full of genuine
pride for her clutch of Grammys. She’s no ingenue,

I knew, I knew. I wasn’t, too. I aspired
to Bottom in the spring play, his despair

hilarious as Pyramus, a Puck in ivied diapers
making him an ass, my ass, praised

by the Queen of the Fairies. I was a royalist
to Björk and Alanis; my bedroom, a solitary

stanza where I jacked off and sobered
up and wrote myself into a bedsore.

At my worst I was tedious.
At my best I went outside.

JAMES DAVIS is the author of Club Q (Waywiser, 2020), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Recent poems appear in American Literary Review, MumberMag, SINK, and Best New Poets. He lives in Denton, Texas, and blogs about videogame music for Cartridge Lit.