Daniel James
Guided by Light
At the top of Chilhowee, the mountain hums like it knows our names.
The car door creaks open – an iron crow whispering secrets
and we pour out like uneven syrup, my son and I,
spilling into the night, thick and unsure.
The stars above us blink like they’ve been caught in a lie,
their freckles scattered carelessly across the face of forever.
He squints, maps their constellations as if they were
buried treasure, though no map I’ve ever seen
smelled so sharply of pine and gasoline.
“You know,” he says, “the stars don’t care about us.”
And for a moment I imagine him
as an astronaut marooned on some soft yellow moon,
eating cold beans and listening for my voice
on a broken radio. “Do you copy?”
But all he hears is muffled static.
He stretches out on Chilhowee’s rocky back,
his hair catching starlight like a spider’s web.
I tell him that they aren’t stars but tiny lighthouses,
each one guiding us safely through the vastness.
He laughs. Says, “That’s stupid.”
But I see he is stealing glances,
as if testing my theory with his plucky, suburban heart.
I keep quiet then, letting the air between us swell
with everything I won’t say:
like how I’d pluck the smallest star and feed it to him
if I thought it would keep him safe,
or how his laugh carries more weight
than the anchors buried in my chest.
Above, the Milky Way pretends to drift apart,
but we know better – the seams hold strong
when no one is looking.
He’s falling asleep now, his breath
a whisper escaping a house fire.
And I wonder: does he feel it,
this quiet hurricane of love,
this impossible glow,
this thing I’d never say out loud?
I write it instead,
in the fine print of every moment like this –
the silent contract of father and son,
two shadows beside a car
that talks like an iron crow,
spilled out on a mountain
that thinks it knows us.
The Peculiar Tale of Moonbeam Roads
I found it dangling from the corner of my eye,
a road stitched together by threads of moonlight,
wobbling like an old waltz on a crooked gramophone.
My first step made a sound like someone cracking open
a pistachio shell somewhere in Nevada.
The second step was colder, heavier –
a young man in a corduroy suit stopped to ask
if I’d seen his lost parrot (I hadn't),
but I told him it was likely debating linguistics
with a tortoise in the grass somewhere.
The road unraveled itself as I walked –
the asphalt alternated between static television fuzz
and a parade of glowing soup cans marching south.
A woman wearing a gown made of smoke
waddled by, holding the moon itself in her left hand.
"You’ll need one of these," she cackled,
offering me a matchstick dipped in honey.
I pocketed it, though I wasn't sure why.
Each glance burned with its own rules –
mountains folded like origami elephants,
an orchestra of chairs played violins in reverse.
The stars gathered around
a kneeling dog who spoke Latin –
at least that's what it sounded like
when I passed through the sound of it.
“Redemption is a couch stuffed with feathers,”
the dog whispered, his eyes imploding
into constellations I recognized years ago
on a cereal box I now couldn't quite place.
I tried to keep count of my steps,
but numbers warped, bent into corkscrews.
I reached a cedar tree holding court with the wind.
Its shadow offered me tea in a porcelain thimble.
Inside the tea floated a small sailboat with three cats
singing in French about the sun catching fire.
“Sip,” the shadow encouraged,
and a thousand miniature memories burst in the air
like firecrackers laced with forgotten dreams.
The moonbeam road continued forever, or maybe
just until the moment I decided it ended.
But who could end something like this?
I crossed paths with the scent of lilac rolling uphill –
a whisper fell from the sky,
“Your shoelaces are planning a mutiny,” it said,
with the voice of an old crow.
Daniel F. James is a Louisiana-born Army veteran now living in East Tennessee. After a 12-year career in journalism, he turned his focus to poetry, exploring themes of transformation and resilience through vivid, often surreal imagery. His work has appeared in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, The Tennessee Magazine, Appalachian Bare, and the poetry anthology Bayou Blues and Red Clay.
