Month: May 2025

Cookie Cake

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I cut cookie cake with plastic butterknife
a birthday my age is showing not my celebration
in the office a long way to the center I repeatedly

say I slice some New York pizza I shape
a biscotti I am the awkward focal point
struggling through the cake rock my boss

offers me a Swiss army knife I refuse
she swears it’s clean the PEOPLE want
a show they want to see struggle I

bellow hands shaking through thick paper
plate after plate she says I’m impressed
you didn’t break and my piece is

so sweet I can barely eat I
do it anyway the work
I put in deserves dessert

(originally published in Squawk Back, Fall 2022)

Exhaustion

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

The rain falls, turns to ice.
In my periphery the knot

in the blinds’ pullstring slinks
down but when I turn I see it

has not moved. Still the afternoon.
Now it’s dark. I have not slept.

The rain keeps my heart wet.
I want to come home soon.

Missed the changing of the leaves.
They’re dead now, waiting

on another season, the one
that beckons bees. I

want to do so much today,
but I haven’t started.

(originally published in Review Americana, Winter 2022)

#1

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

When I say you are my number
one I mean in the line of infinity:

crystals in sand, the observable
universe, atoms in the pretzel of

our hands– we were in the back-
seat. You were in the middle

of a knot, trying to emerge
beyond the physics that

has no name to call us.

(originally published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Spring 2023)

Facebook Dating

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Don’t you want to date everyone you’ve ever known?
Here’s a way:
I’ve got a secret
admirer. So do you
& you & you & you you you you you you you.
Your heart is an information superhighway
                               you’ve followed
                                to the Pacific, at least,
                                  & swam & swam & swam
                                       to be lost in blue
                                       endless scrolling
                                       you like & wow &
                                                                     love.

(originally published in Setu, Summer 2020)

Most of What I Say

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

is meaningless. Half
my lines converge into
lies. Perhaps I love you.
Perhaps I’ll never know.
I am trying to become
a student of myself,
the stars, their pretend
constellations. What
I see up there are daggers,
their staggering glints
of infinity, how star-gazing
is tracing all the ways
I may have never met you.

(originally published in Hiram Poetry Review, Spring 2022)