akron

Silicon Valley (Season One, Episode Eight)

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

When you see me on screen–
with blue jacket and plastic
glasses– listening to Zach
Woods brainstorm a plan
to pivot Pied Piper into
an app that can attract
rodents– like the fairy tale,
you’d think this guy on TV
is one lucky bastard.
But you probably didn’t
notice, because you don’t
know me, and you see hundreds
of people on screen
living the dream every day.
And you can see me in season
two and the first episode
of the show, ever–
the very first scene,
during the Kid Rock
concert– on stage with a
hundred other extras, and–
at the time, I had
just moved to Los Angeles,
and the background roles
I had been cast for
resulted in me
on a projector!
My friends at home
who got used to me
no longer being able
to meet them drunk
at Highland Tavern on
Mondays were now not
completely surprised
to see me rewindable
in their living rooms.
I felt destined for great
things, marked this only
the beginning, like
everyone else chasing
dreams in the city of angels.
But all I could afford to eat
were packets of beef
ramen, boxes of blue
Kraft mac and cheese
with water instead
of milk– no butter.
Hard-boiled eggs
kept me alive
long enough
to come home
to show friends
who were getting used
to me being able to
meet them drunk at
Highland Tavern on
Mondays my favorite clip–
with blue jacket
and plastic glasses,
I listen to Zach Woods
brainstorm a plan
to pivot Pied Piper
into an app that can
attract rodents–
like the fairy tale.


(originally published in Statement Magazine, Spring 2023)

Beer Pong in Your Basement

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I was new to this
kind of longing

sticky all my fingers
on red fingernail cups

but I was a visitor I was a loner
I lived in my car

a couch was a luxury
four cats purred and clawed

at me I couldn’t sink anything
into the drinks. I sank

but made myths I missed
everyone in Akron everything

that happens to you
sticks to you. swish

there was a way to
live in all places at once.

Pittsburgh Columbus Akron
Los Angeles. my memories

are mine and they are selfish. I cling
to what I forget which is what

I drink away which is all
the spills over all the years

I haven’t yet wiped clean.

(originally published in The Seventh Quarry, Summer 2023)

Annie, to Say the Ocean Hasn’t Changed You–

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Tune-lover, beachcomber sculpting
seashells from stones to listen for ripples (nothing

loaded but time) and I have written– haven’t I–
distance into oblivion (that tidal bass a metaphor,
its vastness deepening) & am I not a shell of was

once, was gripping to any mast to lose
the sea, change quivering– I swear– every molecule
of my being, I must (from the must) of any old

ceiling, the dust it lends to fading carpets,
the ones we walked and walk on today

(originally published in The Broken City, Summer 2021)

7.13.13

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

We covered ourselves in soot in my mom’s basement–
you told me you loved me but I had to move home

to have your heart. We dug holes in the backyard
but already too many buried bodies so I boarded

the plane, returned to L.A. to live at the foot of hills.
I said I’d visit sometime, up top, to overlook the ocean

I knew teeming with unspeakable life–
I could not say a word of it to anyone.

 

(originally published in Hamline Lit Link, Spring 2020)

Entropy at Highland Square

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Each time I come home a little something
erodes, a smooth stone rubbed against cement
for a few hours. Walking into Zub’s,
into Ray’s– used to be the crowd could be
religious for me. A thunderspark, my ego
self-distributed communion. Yes, I want
a sea of friends to greet me when I go
home, forever the place I must be
magnetized to, being the treadmill I ran
up to a certain age. I aged better than I
thought, but I aged, I. aged, T. aged, T. aged,
A. aged, M. aged, R. aged, W. aged– and live
in other cities now. The jobs and kids, the
wanting them– I acknowledge the finally
shifting tectonics beneath my feet I so long denied.
I stand at an empty table with everything extinct,
drinking Christmas Ale in the light of flickering
football fields. I play 20 Questions with myself
imagining what my friends might ask me.
Am I alive? A mineral? Furniture? Ovate,
made of fur, smaller than a bread box?
Am I a utility? Can I eat myself?

Do you call when it’s not convenient?
When you are not around?
                                                       When?

Are you an animal? Malleable? Leather?
                                                       A vegetable?

Are you something a bird might wear? A feather,
                                                       weightless as the wind?

(originally published in Marias & Sampaguitas, Summer 2021)

On the table at the family

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

gathering is a photo of me
in flip-flops atop the roof
of my childhood home
holding a rake to the sky
my brother says I did not

recognize that was you
my sister says wow you are
actually doing manual labor
and in my mind I know
that was the morning after

M stayed over when
I was visiting from LA and
I had just finished raking
grimy blackened leaves off
the roof that gathered in

the years since Dad died
but it’s true he made me
hate the yard and stressed
the lawn as living in a filth
we’d have to fix and every

few days in the summer
he’d place the red mower
outside the shed waiting
for me to kill the grass in
diminishing rectangles

(originally published in Rat’s Ass Review, Fall 2020)

The Similarities

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

between you both are more Picasso
Pollack than Leibovitz     however
much I disengage    the Oculus will never
be Pennsylvania    though I have advanced
technology in my pocket    (I still have
the broken faces we captured)  I seek
the thin thread between real   what
I wish to be real   where I want to go
if time ever bends into black hole
I’ll head back home to Ohio and give
a hug to everyone    I somehow love
as an alarm    or Chekhov’s gun
telling   you are the people I still love
in the future you will reassemble into
magazine collage   and still resemble
the hummus-stained server in 2012

 

(originally published in Bindweed Magazine, Winter 2020)