Month: January 2025

Rainwater Is Now Undrinkable

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

everywhere around the world.
I learn this at work, a television
production office. A film would
frack lands surrounding its sets
were it to save a few hundred
bucks– you thought I’d say lives?
What powers that be? We’re alive,
yes, already pulsing red rivers
breached with microplastics.
The jingling adds up in my veins.
When I read forever chemicals,
I want it to mean love
but it is in the way we will
suffer together, forever,
oil rigs raised, still, all
over, hands up in ugly prayer.
The burning questions I want
to ask I can’t even stand
outside in a storm and be satiated.

(originally published in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Winter 2023)

Graph

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I’m into overheads, shelves, island sprawls,
crawling around books before picking them up.
Trying to catch a glimpse of something broken or shifting–
I’m in these spaces to expose something beautiful,
to be drawn down into a point and turned into a graph,
digging hard for data not there, backtracking
to the beginning, seeking a thread
of writing, dance, or music, looking for chalk markings,
finding a new cartography of data and madness,
becoming, at best, a spider as my fingers brush
chalk on concrete, out to the margins
of garden, a rough outline of a new
map of air, a new art from chaos,
the grid in my hands bent to my will.
I can always find my center in a world I’ll never know.

(originally published in Sweet Tree Review, Winter 2023)

Karaoke Night

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I have gone out for karaoke but the world
says otherwise. There is a line I think not

to cross. Surely someone I know, surely a boundary
full of music and atmosphere to let me be

myself and allow the frogs to consider me
a peer, rhythmic applause with their throats.

What a swamp I have become–
I wish I were the Everglades,

as relentlessly mosquito. As hot. As I am a thousand
miles from my destination though

you say I am close in this way. The roundabouts
of the city. How long have I not known how

this would end? That it would
end? Back of the line.

(originally published in The Wise Owl, Summer 2024)

June 19, 2019 – Shadyside

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

You sit on a bench on Walnut Street
texting with a boomerang smile the wine

glasses around you cycling out strangers
and I want to ask you for a drink you ask

about my bags of food I’m bringing back
to work and the sky is cerulean your voice

in the cacophony of cars starting stopping
the crowd around us whispering midday

in the sunshine I want to walk free without
work I’d say the first bite this world is yours


(originally published in Fleas on the Dog, Summer 2020)

Tuesday

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

we again drink through tuesday
on a rooftop around the corner of
where we grew up watching traffic
nearly crash into every other car
at rush hour there’s no room for
interpretation at 6 pm everyone
comes home from work cranky
this fucked economy of waking
to pay bills a sunrise for the rich

(originally published in Penmen Review, Summer 2022)

Thirty (and a Half)

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I ate five scoops of Breyers chocolate-peanut butter
ice cream and still want more–

                                  this, after two “meals” of beef-
flavored nothing noodles (Maruchan ramen)

I’m thirty (and a half)

When do I stop running
from “the good future”

                                      I see it through the
crystal balls of rich kids’ Instagrams

Say it with me:

                  I AM LIVING IN THE PAST.

                                  clap emoji

                  I WANT WHAT YOU HAVE.

                        clap emoji clap emoji

                          dancing girl emoji

                         But here’s the thing.

Earth spins so much it’s dizzying.
I’m running the opposite direction
to meet my past self but that fucker
doesn’t want to rendezvous.

                                          The future called
and told me to put the phone down, you’re
sweating arsenic
                 and They were right. I needed
a shower to cleanse myself of everything

before the neighbors made a stink about my stench.

(originally published in SCAB Magazine, Summer 2020)

Chain

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Cramped in that silver
nook by the kitchen

was how not to know me.
The panini-maker pressed

pitas onto various vegetables
that were consumed and

capitalized. Chickpeas
churning in the high-

grade processor (with
special red spice).

Carrots in the juicer,
bananas in the blender,

hearts on dark trays headed
to tables by the window

overlooking the snow-
plowed parking lot. I dropped

wine glasses all week
and would you agree

it was too much when
the army came in

to sweep glass
off the floor?

(originally published in Stick Figure Poetry Quarterly, Spring 2023)