baseball

Lance Uppercutski Celebrates His Cubs’ World Series Win

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

ive never wanting any thing more
in my life just screaming into a wall
for 8 hours naked n my badroom
crying in bed from last nite’s win

bcuz 2day finally we are all
child-bears proud of our job
as “underdogs all year” (it’s
smelly “under dogs” LOL)

as the saying goes, “chicaGO
big lest u go where u grew up”
& theres truth to this now
even tho i always said

“u dont need 2 be 2 big
to leave” lol zack was 16
when he left no FOXsport in heaven
no baseball, dad, etc. never wanting

any thing more in my life just screaming
into a wall for 8 hours naked and alone
im craving arbys 4 roast beef all that meat
to sink into & make me feel less alive

(originally published in Jokes Review, Summer 2020)

I Think of Giraffes Sometimes. I Hope They Sometimes Think of Me.

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

In Kathleen’s apartment in Oregon,
I ask her where even is home?

Clevelanders-turned-transplants,
maybe never knowing.

I see my mom’s mown lawn
in the green fields our baseball

team travels through, my friends
in tweets spitting scores or stats.

These, I don’t care about,
but I join in discussion.

Blue hands to high-five,
then to put my phone down.

 

(originally published in Hobart, Winter 2018)

Used to Play Baseball

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I am a nail-punctured tire
the rubber smell
with you, unfinished, our wheels –

constant motion
squealing for still.
Our bodies, bands stretched and heaved

in bundles of clothing
(deserted starling
feathers scattered and–)

navigating roadmaps to our cores,
you can reach the end
and pluck what you want.

I just want you to see me for who I am
when your legs aren’t clamped around me,
the squeeze in the mitt.

 

(originally published in First Literary Review – East, Spring 2018)

The Kansas City Royals Cope With Loss

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

A river isn’t really blue. The Mississippi
has dried, and even love is transparent.

We adorn ourselves blue so loss
can be quantified in color. Such

is the brittle paintbrush, naked
and grieving, but we are not

the color of grieving,
nor tobacco spat in the dugout

in shame. We remember
the dirt, and who we loved,

long before we searched
clouds’ faces for ghosts,

her grays in the white
within eternal blue.

 

(originally published in ‘the vacant hinge of a song’, courtesy of Origami Poems Project)

Up and Down the Stairs

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Watched watched time
slip in every missed wooden swing
and pixelated glove’s plop

I ran up and down the stairs on
measured pink-speckled carpet,
to the basement, to the kitchen, to the basement,
to the kitchen – a treadmill’s dream, the incline
an inclination against elderly lethargy,
the seventh inning, an extra inning,
watery left eye saying, how do you move
so swiftly, turning to the tv to make a call for

the bullpen, the bullpen,
call in the bullpen,

call the hospital:
the only time I said I love you and
I croaked it

in my chest. The mumbled sine wave.
I clicked the phone off,
game ending, closer to the closer, the

closed door,
the casket we closed to forget.

 

(originally published in Corvus Review, Winter 2015 Issue)