Month: November 2018

Maggie

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

After you invited me to your brother’s jazz
concert you said you liked me too much
and I couldn’t handle that, the thought

of our togethered trombone slide into an infinity
accompanied by spacetime’s deep sound.
I avoided you the only way I knew how:

my absence for your words a dangling CO2.
This, another failed online dating experience,
a week and (it was electric for a time) the zap

of each other in a cold January condo over and
over, a thousand volts then whole note rest,
a singed week’s limb removed by blizzard wind.

 

(originally published in Postcard Poems and Prose, 2017)

Warmth

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I want to fold the dog
into an origami pipe
smoke it
and forget this
was ever a dog

later I will want
this dog nestled
next to me
asleep
fire lingering

instead I
fold creases
into blanket
wrapping
out the cold

I can’t shake
but for what
it takes
to sleep
through dawn

 

(originally published in Succor, 2017)

Back Patio

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

It’s 8 P.M. and lights hang like eggs
on a string beneath the moon
from the second-floor window
to the wooden fence.

The air conditioner threatens
the chattering insects
with its drone suckling noise
from fading light.

A car door slams. The almost-distant
hum of traffic. Sirens occasionally
dot red the air, causing the dogs
in the neighborhood to howl.

What does anyone mean
when they say animal?
Outside I am one
with the wild.

Beyond vine-green, breathing
fence I hear a basketball
bounced, tossed, missed,
dropped.

Whomever is playing must be lost
in thought, making calculations
of which he is unaware,
surviving in one way he knows.

 

(originally published in CultureCult Magazine, 2017)

A Date with Doubt

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

You look around the room
and rate singles from one to ten
in terms of melancholy
but don’t know
how to rate yourself–
Pacific waves flow through
you almost drown
in the sea of your thoughts–
the scisms between pen and mirror,
heart and mind, these are thieves
who will lie to you ‘til the Greyhound
leaves for Cincinnati at 11:30.
Until then we watch superheroes do bad
stand-up comedy in the conference room
at the new Mikey’s, eating mushroom pizza
with too-hot sauce. Bass pounds from the stage
so loudly we walk to 16-Bit next door
to drink water and pretend we are drunk,
our mouths rocketships exploring the universe
of each other– the rotation of stars
confused with physics. In the end all you want
is chocolate cake. Your blue eyes curve away
in that soaring flyball-to-left way. The way
you sway me back to simpler times
when buying CDs was a holy act
of personal preference
and I stayed sealed on a shelf in plastic,
waiting to give the world my music.

 

(originally published in Zingara Poetry Picks, Summer 2017)