color

Eiffel 65

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

             blue house
          with a blue
               tall weed
        sunflower heart blue
    snake on the window
           board half in half out half
         void no sun no blue
                the sky fence
            hill inside blue
          not blue no
             blue is the fire
           smoke and eggplant eyes
              blue death in drawings
           a deep blue wind and water
        dirt on my face and hands
     cobweb and dust blue dream on blue
  is purple is blazing eyes in your skull
     is my skull same face different
              blue flat and bright light
           blue silk on blue bed

(originally published in Ginosko Literary Journal, 2021)

Ephemeral Garden

/ James Croal Jackson / 1 Comment

The map leads from bloom to wing
to sky– we followed gracefully before
black swan wings haunted our spines.

I was tangled in the garden of words
and you did not believe a thing
I said. I cowered in sagebrush

to study flying squirrels (the wingless
claim the sky). I told you I would never tell
another lie because what is truth

in an ephemeral garden, where the birdsong
of thrashers becomes language?
I attempt to look away from truth

but the truth is, nothing in this world
shocks me any more than when I crane my head
to see the nightmare we have become.

 

(originally published in Zany Zygote Review, Spring 2017)

“I Wish I Knew How to Quit You,” Says the Moon

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

We know it is us
who wish to quit the moon.

We close our eyes our jaggedness
could drive the sun away but never
in the way our metaphors could.

Still we write the moonlight
into the sand and growl
at the tide

and again
when the tide returns.

We cry from the shape
our lives took to intersect–

an hourglass
filled with sugar,
or a snail. Or a million

hourglasses, a million snails,
a million glimmering shells
in a measured slowness.

You were talking about the sunrise–
but I never wanted to look.

 

(originally published in Thin Air, Spring 2016)

The Photograph Was a Drunken Winter

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

slackened falls into chaos: each plod
a sobering imprint on snow

buzzing cavernous hearts
white honey swathes the air

the dewdrop pale of her shirt, arms curved
from the door in bent-seven candles, icicled

waxen breath hissing this
is the moment sculptured to ice:

a future with gluey trees barren at night,
tongues born licking telephone poles

static moments stretched to angel hair
feel like rare dreams caught in dim light

 

(originally published in Scarlet Leaf Review)