Both Ways Home is now available, and below you’ll find two poems from the Albany, NY section and then two poems from the San Antonio, TX section, as well as a short story from the Albany section called “Bring Your Son.” If you’d like to see even more samples, I’ve posted some at my Instagram profile, @that_poet_james_duncan. Thanks and I hope you enjoy!

Skyway

now the workers in hardhats are back

from their lunch and drilling away with

their pneumatic jackhammers as some

pick up this cone and move it here, pick

up that one and move it there, the long

trek into the Skyway, reshaping the old

highway onramp into a sweeping park

rising into the blue eastern sky and down

to the curb of the Hudson River with the

hope that accessibility might alter the

fate of such a misfortune, a city turning

its back on its greatest treasure, the

running ruined channels of the river

that now calls to us from its banks at

night when even the stars and moon

cannot reflect without pity and regret,

and so, the workers churn through the

blacktop and hew at steel with casual

grit to reshape the city one season at a time,

future Skyway debris dancing like dust

motes through the downtown avenues and

the side streets, the sounds of our collective

hope hammering away as children wait, as

food vendors wait, as older couples wait hand

in hand on their way to some movie house

or repertory theatrical, young couples off

to dinner and wild nights at pubs and taverns

lining the cobbled streets of Lark and Pearl

and avenues throughout overlooked Albany,

all of them waiting for that Skyway into the dawn

and all life’s promises that lie in wait beyond

Ode to Madison Avenue at 6:15 pm

the rich hue of lamppost light

daubing the nighttime sky

with neon honey and saffron, a dome

of incandescence revealing cracked sidewalks

and small dandelions reaching

up toward the moon, blooming under

the electric orange of humanity’s humming addiction,

Edison’s curse and gift, our soul in filament dosage

forming the sharp golden point of anticipation

for a night that is, as of yet, still too far away

for neon to make real

yet we wait, pulse with hope, and ebb along

the eastbound sidewalk in step with the moon

now caught in pine horizons and the rich

hue of lamppost light, we wait

we wait and pulse

with hope

Bar America

I’ve heard that tower rotates and

I’ve heard there’s a restaurant at

the top that’s just a glorified Jim’s

Diner, or overpriced seafood, but

I’ve never been up there to find out

despite the fact it has dominated

this city’s skyline for my entire life

from down here, in some alleyway

near Bar America on a Friday night,

it looks like a monument to eternity,

a pawn shop Eifel Tower aglow in

orange neon afterburn and dust

and from within the bar the clacking

of the pool tables and the smell of

Lone Star beer draws me back,

a calmer evening now that we are

able to communicate with the

Mexican Nationals who came in

looking for a fight when they found

us at their pool table, insistent eyes

and steely jaws, all of our high school

Spanish failing us until some regular

stepped in and explained, and half

an hour later we were all buying

each other dollar beers and grinning

even though we still needed a translator,

but that’s how it goes some nights, the

world spinning madly as towers grip

the concrete earth beneath, and all

of us wandering beyond borders and

language just trying to hunker down

and distract ourselves with drinks

and games and temporary companionship

until, like every tower eventually, we

too fall to dust, crumble beneath our

own weight and expectations, leaving

a gap in the horizon of someone else’s

night only filled by stars, that orange neon

glow, and the sounds of a bar calling

them to come inside and wait for their turn

Ineffable

we were outside the patio cantina

watching a line of rusted boxcars

lumber through the desert air beyond the reach

of the cantina’s carnival lights

glinting among voices and memories and ghosts

in some ways I am still at that southside patio

drinking in your honor and in your debt,

drinking in neon and catatonic delight

toasting the things we don’t speak of,

things we cannot let go,

no matter the hour

or how many boxcars declare their willingness

to carry that burden into the night

Bring Your Son

She worked for the state in Albany’s capital plaza. Not the Corning Tower that dominated the skyline, but in one of the four smaller skyscrapers set in a line just behind it. From the ninth floor she could see the entire plaza: the boxy state museum and library on one end, the long reflective pool stretching hundreds of feet, and on the other end the capitol building, the state court offices, and The Egg, a theater space named after its shape—an egg with the top half sliced off. But it always reminded her of a failed spaceship, something that could take her elsewhere, anywhere, but wouldn’t.

She didn’t like Albany or the highways to get there, especially not the dark underground parking garage that always felt so damp and loud with the echoes of the highway nearby reverberating along the concrete levels and corridors. But she felt better once she made it inside walking the long marble esplanade, brightly lit white walls offset by colorful geometric murals and oversized impressionist sculptures. From there she took the grey elevator to her grey floor to her grey cubicle for another day of clerical filing, form verification, typing, copying documents for distribution, more typing, more filing, more mail runs, endless.

The letter from school asked parents to participate in “Bring Your Child To Work Day” if they were able, and he’d been so good. Not the best, but better than usual. He’d been sleeping in his own bed. He poured his own cereal and milk these days, without spilling. He bathed without complaint. But he still daydreamed too much at school and had wet himself three times in one month. Near misses, he said. He kept almost making it. She chalked it up to an unwillingness to interrupt, a shyness, but the teachers asked about his father, how often they saw one another, how life had been since the divorce. They thought he was stealing (and later found out he wasn’t) and they talked about therapy when he cried at the holiday party. She didn’t see the need, but she worried.

So she took him to work. He was small for his age and blond, but it was fading to brown now that he was six, just as her own hair had done when she was in kindergarten in Nevada all those years ago. He thrilled at the towers, the twisting highway offramps, the dungeon-like parking garage, and the expansive underground promenade full of art and hallways leading to all the various buildings that made up the plaza, as well as the food court inside where, to his excitement, they had both pizza and a McDonalds. But despite the glimmer of delight in his eyes as they wound through the marble halls and climbed aboard the elevator, he spoke quietly and stood close to her, his hand in hers.

He marveled at the view from her window and the height of her office, though it wasn’t her office, just a room she shared with four others in open cubicles, but only one co-worker was in that day. She left him for a moment to find better coffee than the sludge in the break room. Alone now, he edged to the window again and looked at the cityscape below. He called it a canyon in his small mousy voice.

She appeared to his right and almost corrected him to say it was a plaza, but looking out beside him, a better word came to mind—plateau. The plaza rose out of the ground as a giant rectangle and within it all the boxy, modernist buildings rose in precise angles and distances from one another. It was as far from the dry, golden west as one could imagine. Instead of an arid landscape of canyon and plateau, Albany was but a damp and gray slate monument to bureaucracy.

Together they made copies at the big Xerox machine. He liked the smell of the warm paper. He helped her place red tabs on the pages where other people needed to sign them. Then he sat and read his book, Charlotte’s Web, and when she looked up at him reading intently and swinging his legs in his chair, he looked just as he had in that doctor’s office before the psychologist with gray hair in a ponytail and bifocals led him into her office. She waited impatiently, worried somehow that a shard of her divorce had lodged itself into her son’s mind and that she’d never really find it until the damage was done. When the hour was over, the doctor came out and smiled at her.

“Your son is fine.”

“They said he was too sensitive. And too quiet.”

“He is sensitive and emotional but that’s normal—he’s six. Being quiet, reserved, that’s one of the many ways in which children cope with changes and growth. Some feel things deeper, faster, and for longer, and they express it differently, maybe all at once and maybe in subtle drips and drabs. If he was violent, hitting other children, angry, then I would worry. But him? Don’t worry.”

“What should I do?”

“Bring your son back,” she said. “We can focus on self-expression techniques and ways to tell people how we feel that are productive, creative, and maybe more direct. Teachers like direct. They have enough kids to deal with at once. They don’t have a lot of time to unravel mysteries. Bring your son, and we’ll work on that.”

“But he’s okay?”

“More than okay.”

“What’s that building down there,” her son asked, pointing through her office window across the city. “It looks like a castle.”

“Maybe it is,” she said, smiling and watching him closely.

He looked around her office, the overhead lights glowing dull and steady, the gray-green carpet stained with years of foot traffic. He said, “Why can’t you work there instead?”

“Well, I have to work where they tell me to work.”

He considered that for a while, eyeing the empty desks all around him, and just when she thought he was going to go back to his book, he asked, “Will I have to work here too?”

She said no, not if he didn’t want to. He’d work somewhere else, doing something wonderful and exciting and he’d enjoy himself. He’d be happy. She told herself that he’d be happy.

He glanced at her before sitting down and opening his book again. She looked at the papers on her desk waiting for her to file them, then at her son, wondering if happiness was something you found, or if it found you. A door shut somewhere. The boy read his book, and she watched him. The second hand of the wall clock spun in silence, and outside clouds blotted out the sun with indolent steel and the gentle suggestion of rain.