Month: June 2018

Rotor

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

If you drive a car whose
combustion confuses fuel

for air, the engine will quiver
along smooth concrete.

At certain speeds, a clanking
rotor is similar

to the natural cadence
of heartbeats in embrace:

amplitude becomes a deafening
in the stillness of night.

Let a rotating machine of mass
be mounted on a stiff spring

to fix support. The pieces
must move vertically in

a single degree of freedom
even if the rotor is unbalanced,

its hypnotic center missing
one valve’s intake,

forgetting the other’s exhaust.

 

(originally published in Lakeview International Journal of Literature and Arts, Summer 2017)

Facts

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I don’t believe a word you say. The stairs
separate us because you’re on another

level. Gravity is what pulls us together.
& absence of death. You talk in spirals.

I want to follow. A wind-up rotor wheels
his way back. Intransient movement.

I believe in higher planes
when looking to the sky in airports.

 

(originally published in The Stray Branch, Spring 2018)

Spring

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

everything springs to life
again your last
relationship your new
relationship these are strings
on never-ending
balloons with brains inside
of them and hearts
at the center of the brains
beating thinking
if we fly a little higher
there’s no going back

 

(originally published in Dragon Poet Review, Summer 2017)

Athens, Ohio

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

The city was dead when we went
so we intended to fill ourselves
with black magic found
in skeletons on the street.

Look how roots of fallen
trees meld with earth.
Go where lines still meander
on your palms–

we did not share with ghosts
when we reached the end,
no words whispered into steam
of dim lights and Darjeeling,

no further graffiti for your blue
telescope eyes peering through time
to the origin of your cosmos, when
your essence poured from your sleeves

but carried less starlight than it does now.

 

(originally published in The Stray Branch, Spring 2018)

Animalism

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Listen: the Earth’s siren wails
in tones only animals like us can understand.

We are pretending we do not caress ourselves
on the bed of feather blankets.
Wings– and we call them feathers.

Our weightlessness is contagious.
A broken Bob Dylan vinyl.

Tender was the night until the day absolved it so.

If a wolf sleeps through whistle
has he lost his lust? The life

of choice. We are obese with wrong decisions
and our belts contain the weight dribbling
past our buckles.

Kentucky Fried Chicken. Kentucky annexed
by memory. Junebugs live there in relative obscurity.
Junebugs. June bugs.

 

(originally published in The Oddville Press, Summer 2017)