#james crew

—James Crew, from “In Times Like These,” The Weekly Pause (23 December 2025)

— James Crews, "Our Real Purpose" in Poetry is Life (Substack, May 30, 2025)

James Crew, "Beech Trees in Spring", from How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope

James Crew, “After Love”

My friend and I snickered the first time we heard the meditation teacher, a grown man, call himself honey, with a hand placed over his heart to illustrate how we too might become more gentle with ourselves and our runaway minds. It's been years since we sat with legs twisted on cushions, holding back our laughter, but today I found myself crouched on the floor again, not meditating exactly, just agreeing to be still, saying honey to myself each time I thought about my husband splayed on the couch with aching joints and fever from a tick bite―what if he never gets better?― or considered the threat of more wildfires, the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream, then remembered that in a few more minutes, I'd have to climb down to the cellar and empty the bucket I placed beneath a leaky pipe that can't be fixed until next week. How long do any of us really have before the body begins to break down and empty its mysteries into the air? Oh honey, I said―for once without a trace of irony or blush of shame― the touch of my own hand on my chest like that of a stranger, oddly comforting in spite of the facts.

A fist through the pane of our picture window and everything broken between us. The ancient glass shattered, and my wife rose from her separate bed wanting to know what happened. But how could I explain the radiator's cracked gasping that kept me from sleep, the secret life, how I had taken up smoking just for the excuse of some small heat, and then tonight when the winter-warped window would not lift, how I let loose that helpless hook? Wind flowed through the room, blowing white across the column of snow still pillared against the screen. She crossed the freezing tile toward my silence and held my hand now sequined with shards lodged deep in the chapped knuckles. And, Jesus, how easily she massaged each piece of glass from the skin, applying the sting of iodine with a swab as if to bring back every feeling. But when she unrolled the gauze like a sacred scroll and wrapped my hand in it, I had to turn to her, had to touch her flushed, half-feverish cheeks once more. I had to trust those clear streaks cutting tracks down her face were more than simply the tricks of weak streetlight trying to shine. Never mind that kind of turning back has always been punished. Didn't Lot too, just once more, want not only to look back, but also to return to the arms of his lost wife, that metaphorical salt? Didn't he want one more kiss, one last taste to see him through the rest of that endless desert, now alone?