James B. Nicola
Motion
We have to cross the lawn
to get to the bower.
And we have to leave the house
to cross the lawn.
We can go out the front or the back
but first
we have to make up our minds
to leave the house
then leave the house the front way or the back
then cross the lawn and go
to get to the bower
and then we'll be in the bower and can even go
beyond the break
to the outbreak of nearly
everything.
Bio
James B. Nicola's poems have appeared stateside in Shot Glass, the Antioch, Southwest and Atlanta Reviews, Rattle, Tar River, Poetry East, and in many journals in Europe and Canada. He is the featured poet in the current issue of Westward Quarterly, having once received the same honor from New Formalist. A Yale graduate, he won a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, a People's Choice award (from Storyteller), and four Pushcart nominations—from Shot Glass Journal, Parody, and twice from Trinacria—for which he feels both stunned and grateful. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice award. His poetry collections are Manhattan Plaza (2014), Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater (2016), Wind in the Cave (2017), and Out of Nothing: Poems of Art and Artists (2018).