James Claffey hails from County Westmeath, Ireland, and lives on an avocado ranch in Carpinteria, CA, with his wife, the writer and artist, Maureen Foley, their daughter, Maisie, and Australian cattle-dog, Rua. His work appears in many places, including The New Orleans Review, Elimae, Necessary Fiction, fwriction : review , Connotation Press, and Word Riot. His website can be found here.
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Rules of Nature
I came of age in a hollowed-out log, my carapace grown hard, the shimmer of green scoring my underbelly. At the time I wasn't unduly worried by the thought I'd become some self-created godhead. Warmth flowed from the early sun, the dew smoking into air, the influence of a thousand spores lingering in the moment. On the water I saw mallards float by, their smug faces implacable, the impossibility of their capsizing. Before I arrived at this place I discovered my mother's revulsion, made flesh in the cardboard coffin she shut me in. This life a bed of nails, a discordant and unsettling thing, like some monster hiding beneath the bed. Through a narrow slit I saw her crouch near me, a tear or two in her eye. She made no vow to have and to hold me. Whatever happened when the spark of my beginning lit, I forgot. Funny how our bodies comply with the rules of nature, goats know to bleat rather than bellow, an unwritten code of being.
Ritual
The dreams are always the same, the woman with a gold spoon where her left arm should be, the way her childish smile cracks in two like an egg fallen from the nest. The passage in Ulysses about the Andalusian girls lies open on the table, a cup of coffee, untouched. When the daddy longlegs stipples its way down the wall and mouths the spoon it is one of the great wonders of the night. Jessamine-scented—the life of the page-bound woman—she is bold-scented, a lime fragrance, the simple chain about her thin neck. Her spoon feeds me the cod liver oil capsule—a Monday morning ritual corrupting the nighttime.
body parts
Skin—how it fades, falls, pitches, and finally collapses on the body. Silver in black, the needle in the stack. Time created this ill use, ionized water liberally taken, the promise of rebirth, of a tightening of stretched parchment, the bone written on in faint lines. There is a scar at the base of the big thumb on the right hand, bottled glass broken in bits on a cemented wall. Nothing remains visible of the original wound, covered now by the cross on father's grave. Beneath the skin, part the sinews and tendons, and there his rotting body lies asunder.
Bone—marrowed lengths of knotted pain, the wingspan of a balsa-wood airplane, sent flying off the Hill of Tara, the old High Kings beneath the sod. The topography of the land is borne out on the frame of my body, the empty skeleton inside. In the shade of the old enchanted forest a spider picks at the old scar, its eight legs tickle the bone and jar the memories. Something about the spiraling sycamore seeds reminds me of home and the patterns hidden in the peeling wallpaper that grows old in lonely rooms.
Eyes—passed from father to son and back again, those flecks of gold the only increase, a settlement of coin impossible. Strange how the sounds and the stares rebound, words fallen to the ground, the love held in place like a jaw wired in place. And over time the surfeit of misery collects in the interstitial spaces between bone and muscle. One day soon those griefs will be tapped by the fingers of a faith healer as he identifies meridians and unhappiness, pressure points and inhospitability. Until then the old negatives curl and fade, the worsted suits go threadbare, and the compass of the past shudders.
Santa Fe, NM
Sun spills over adobe wall, the splayed form of an old woman vomiting in her back yard shreds what should be a glorious start to the day, sending me backward reeling. I am unworthy to witness such a moment, having snuck here after the bus dropped me off in the plaza. She's an old teacher of mine, and when I heard she was dying I wanted to stop by and see her one last time. We once walked the path to the white cross together in silent meditation. Penitentes.
From where I sit on my ass in the dust, a poster peels off the wall:
Clown. Face.
Vargas.
The ______ is coming to_____.
In the red earth I am an antic traveler in an awkward state. Once I was a hip young cat with a pair of tortoiseshell Wayfarers stuck in my t-shirt and Marlboro's twisted up in the sleeve.
under wave and wash
Spindles—your blossoming tumor holds the ant upside down.
The twined sisters snake from household extract, buried in sump-like mud.
Across the white expanse, hidden zastrugas like the ribs of an ancient ship meander quietly,
The weakest child holds his aunties by their legs, for dear life, his small fingers no match for their robust thighs.
We could cry out loud, against the waves breaking on Santa Claus shore.
Deaf seals ignore the pleas.
The twined sisters snake from household extract, buried in sump-like mud.
Across the white expanse, hidden zastrugas like the ribs of an ancient ship meander quietly,
The weakest child holds his aunties by their legs, for dear life, his small fingers no match for their robust thighs.
We could cry out loud, against the waves breaking on Santa Claus shore.
Deaf seals ignore the pleas.
A striated rock is buried for a whale prayer.