In Bali, it’s the filing of the canines boys to be reborn as men. And in rural My turn now to untangle the Craftsman but I can barely pull the cord. It takes blue-black smoke. Then maneuvering down into that first of countless rounds, post-Ike, post-JFK, so the power-push and I take to trick-driving in third gear, twin two-foot blades mangle anything invisible in the long grass eight feet bodies roiling behind the roar, I mimic —first published in Old Northwest Review D. R. James’s latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020); his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is free, fun, and printable-for-folding at Origami Poems Project; and individual poems have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and journals (including Apricity, November 11, 2020). He lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan.
Rite of Passage
to limit boys’ wild adolescence.
Among Cameroon’s Baka Pygmies
it’s the Spirit of the Forest killing
Illinois, 1964, the May grass green,
resilient as Astro Turf, it’s initiation
for the fraternity of boys-who-mow.
from the rakes and bikes, top it off
with the dregs of last year’s gasoline,
find my chest exceeds the handles,
twenty tugs, more and less throttle,
more and less choke, for the engine
to catch, cough, and wreathe me in its
the sidewalk is easy, dried leaves
and spring debris parting as I push.
But once I clear the pavement, bounce
I become a summer Sisyphus, mini-
supplicant leaning into the pleasure
of some sadistic god. Luckily it’s
is soon supplanted by the self-propelled,
the Wheel Horse rider. Slow-forward
eight years, parents away on vacation,
careening in circles, graduate at my
County job to Farmall tractors, tires
taller than fence posts, brush hogs whose
along a country road. One breezy day
in May, I find where Midwest rabbits nest—
in the green shade of a fencerow crabapple,
away from the shoulder. And once I’ve run
the lowered mower over them, glanced
back to see a dozen brown and blue-red
how other men can keep on mowing.About the Author
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