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Poets

James Penha

A native New Yorker, James Penha has lived for the past twenty-five years in Indonesia.

A collection  of his adaptations of classic Indonesian folk tales won the Cervena Barva Press fiction chapbook contest. No Bones to Carry, the latest volume of Penha’s poetry, is available from New Sins Press 

He edits New Verse News, a website for current-events poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

James Penha's poem, "Lesson" can be found under the Appreciation category in the 2016 Origami Poems anthology The Best of Kindness available on Amazon.

 

 

 

► Jack's Origami microchaps & selected poems are available below.

Origami Microchap

Poem(s)

  

Stalking Celebrities

    

Click title to download microchap

Audio Version
read by James Penha

•

_charlie_

the little
must
ache
--
querulously
it revs up from attraction to the
                         high light
                          right eye,
then alternates with the pendulum
                                       of
                         time
current,
frees the nose to inhale gusts
of great air,

and, truly,
                   enforces a smirk,
the little man is empowered.

 

Woody Allen, Alive and Well

I trailed Woody Allen up Madison Avenue once.
Block after block, I slowed to his footsteps. He
talked with a woman oh
twice his height. Not Keaton,
nor Mia of course. They parted the waves.
In the wake, I watched millions
tilt their eyes and try to watch
with casualness
where they went.
Not one broke stride;
we yielded Woody his vector. But at the plane
of passage
all turned for the denouement
with their heads upon their shoulders
and quickly back to each other to ask,
rhetorically, “Do you know who that was?”
or to say who that was.
The sure
only smiled.
Others looked back.
This city was Woody’s.
 
I watched Woody and the woman
turn a block onto Fifth and into an apartment house.
 
It has taken me years to intrude with this, but
my sadness
makes me want to write
that Woody
lived with reverence.
 
DIGGING LORCA

Do soggy bones matter
more than Bernarda’s broken
cane or New York
tenements or a perfect pair of olives
in hand? For if we hold, Federico,
your delicate fingers, trace the lines
of your lips with our fingers,
and hear your inspiration
even now, we have no need
for the palpable
to imagine you.
Exhumation reminds me more
of the next innocent
to die wordlessly
in a ditch.
 

Rudy

Emerging from the parking garage
to the November light of 51st Street
I needed a Circle in the Square
where Ah Wilderness was
amidst crowds jaywalking to queues
for curtains when I felt a startling
thump to my back. It smacked of
muggery, spun me round like a
revolving door, but spindleless I
plummeted down shelves of strangers
to the ground on my ass and so saw
his horizontal right arm a bulbous bow
breaking the ice of pre-theater klatches
and the carelessly ignorant gutter bergs,
his muffler flying behind on the wind
his stride created: Nureyev, head knitted,
feet booted for the cold, commanding
the theatre district, utterly
virtuosic--in a coup de Tatar--rushing
street-lit to the wings and Margot
deux in fewer than ten minutes. I sat
an invisible corps in his life's ballet
losing my breath for his buoyancy.

 

EULOGY AT OPRYLAND

Merle Watson, he done it right:
He didn’ plow‘is veins
with rock ‘n’ roll
or mill’is brains
with jazz. That
boy jest slid’is strings
o’er the songs of’is pa.
Didn’ open’is mouth,
didn’ hog the light.

I al’ays thought
I’d like t’expire here
on this stage
with my fiddle
fallin’ on me like a lily.

But Merle was a realer country boy
to die wrapped up
in the hum of’is tractor.

•
James Penha © 2012

Genealogy

    

Cover is a mural detail
from the Pod Hotel NYC
(formerly Pickwick Arms)
 •

Opening Lines

Nina jumped
from a fifth-floor bath
of the Pickwick Arms Hotel.
 
I’m swaddled
in Nina’s unsteady
8 millimeter arms.
 
Later a splicing
machine made me
the family archivist
 
and my father’s
black and white movies
were read all over.
 
Nina’s sister Bertha--“Ah,
Nina and her grandson”
at the epic premiere.
 
I’ve no Grandma
Nina in my memory
but Nina on film.
•
James Penha © 2011
  

Sumtran Highways
 
  

Cover Photo by James Penha

 

Riverwalk

We slip on jungle river stones back, rock
by rock, year by year, till we are
immersed in yesterdays swimming mightily
against the flow of time. We grasp
at corners of the past
in the crooks of ancient boulders and crawl
through eras to epochs and edens
where we are the first humans
rubbing our eyes to find
ourselves born to blue butterflies,
green mansions, and infinity falls
in cascading canyons pristine, primeval,
untouched until this singular moment
when we are aboriginal, indigenous.
•
 
James Penha © 2009
  

Lessons From The Archipelago

    

Cover Photo by James Penha

•

MOUNTAIN STEPS

In absolute silence
I know the river,
birds, the wind, and you.
The flower attracts a squirrel
along a branch too loose
to weigh. Bees rejoice.
The hummingbird tastes nectar
-- but smells squirrel
abandoned orchid.
A shining swirl of flies
-- float in the garden rain
Hurricane of life.
Treetops,
tangled fronds and ferns.
Monkey sirens.
Writing on rice
paper, durable and mothproof:
Stops my bleeding.

A Bali Dancer, A New World

My mask
 
faces dead moons
breathing breasts
sun bursts
eruptions
of language
when you stare silently
 
into the corner
terrified of your seeing
my geometry
 
I turn away
 
ART HISTORY
IN NORTHERN SUMATRA

The Kotanopan jungle
mountains are cut
in the foreground
by the rapid river
and so shimmer at sunset,
like a pointillistic painting until
every tree shakes
and the sky itself explodes
into a guernica
of bats: dark night
before night
when the landscape fractalizes
into pollack drips
and daubs de kooning
and bits of landscape
in my cubist eyes.

 

THE SALT EATERS
IN SOUTH TAPANULI, SUMATRA

the family
shares a dinner
of rice
and salt
a few grains each
of rice
and salt
a main course
of rice
and salt
saved
to last
a treat for
the family

 

ODE ON WOOD
IN BORNEO

Because I sit here at home
with nature
my arms in line with the grain of the wood
my mouth open and yet knot
my hand dripping with the resin,
I seem some Romantic ideal.
Because you find me so,
you see
in every plank
in every tree
some one
much like me.

•
James Penha © 2010