James Walton is published in many anthologies, journals, and newspapers. He is the author of four widely acclaimed collections of poetry: The Leviathan’s Apprentice, Walking Through Fences, Unstill Mosaics, and Abandoned Soliloquies. His fifth collection will be released shortly.
He was nominated for The Best of the Net’ 2019, and is a Pushcart Prize 2021 Nominee.
Interview with the Author
Uncharted Constellations Contributions
A short history of a universe in fold theory is a lyrical fable of space colonisation. Here’s a snippet:
Stacked in the honeycomb are the first and the last of before. The hexagons rise and spread in an inverted pyramid of captured moments. Within each carapace a slow beat is monitored, measured, charged, regulated while decades irresistibly pass.
‘Hero of the Soviet Union, Twice’ juxtaposes Alexei Leonev’s perilous space walk with his father’s experience of being exiled to a Stalinist gulag. Here’s a snippet:
Like his son, dreaming of circumferences
the hatch too small
without the release of conscience
the sun too bright an enigma.
‘Neil Armstrong’s Three Stage Punctuation’ is an Australian desert poem that conjures up an idyllic landscape infused with haunting reminders of those first moon walks. Here’s a snippet:
Apple blossom carries the love letter kiss of butterflies,
delivered in the slow somersault breeze
moon landing clumsy, on the creek now river.
Listen to James Walton read ‘Neil Armstrong’s Three Stage Punctuation’ here:
Severed Souls Contributions
Collected Works is a beautifully written flash fiction piece about a man who expresses himself through the literature that he surrounds himself with and that he tattoos all over his body. Here’s a snippet:
He still slept on the back veranda his father had closed in for him, as the volumes increased to cocoon the house, bookmarking seasons, spilling language, drafting lives out of the wings of pages. His father died in a room full of old Russians, French, existentialists, and abridged histories.
‘Interstellar Notes – Travel Warnings – Earth’ is a warning about the powers that be in the universe, though it’s not clear whether those cosmic fixers and shakers are alien or human. Here’s a snippet:
The energy of one of their minds
freed of hemispheric axis
would drive dimensional shift
get you transpired home
solve the linguistic paradox
generate new nebula storms
‘S.O.S’ is an almost desperate plea to another species for humanity’s souls that James Walton manages to infuse with hope of salvation while still emphasising the severity of the situation it describes. Here’s a snippet:
come from beyond your stellar dialect
remind us that a kiss
is the most intimate grace of sex
that all tears taste of salt
and there is hope for us yet.
Guest Blog
12.56pm Eastern (Guest blog: James Walton)
I dreamed in cerulean. The churn underneath creation’s folly, the lisp in thinking aloud, the slow breath towards nebula. Because I did not speak until my seventh year, my day was all sky. In July 1969, around 1.00pm our time, the black and white television in the crowded classroom held out the hand of otherworld.…
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