date

It’s Complicated

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Sure, I know the DJ at Belvedere’s tonight
but that is all I have. My body is an ocean
liner that imagined a destination when
departing, but lost its way mid-voyage
while passengers scream it’s okay!
It’s okay!
                  On simple days
I open the window and watch
clouds pass with my long-hair
cat, breathing in the breeze like
we’ve both never been outside
before, trying to find some
comfortable place to rest
with the rail jutting up,
a dull blade.

(originally published in Ink Sac, Summer 2023)

Marina & the Diamonds

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

After our date at Melt Bar and Grilled
cheese grease macaroni and butter saliva
dripped from our lips onto crumb plates
back when Marina & the Diamonds were hip
(if they were ever) in style I wired it from aux

cord to speakers to let you know I am not
a robot in an operatic tone indicating
romantic desperation my circuits buzzing
& I thought during the open-heart chorus
you’d say much more than cool

(originally published in Ygdrasil, Winter 2021)

O

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

lost contact walking
in circles around franklin

village you wanted to be alone
at the festival of rockets

you paid for everything
we met at the coffeepot

concert steamer summers
spent in a young galaxy

where we both loved
desert guitars

the avenue droughts
and cold

basements

(originally published in Rabid Oak, Spring 2022)

Memories of You Abuzz Alight Aflight a Kite

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

soaring over beach over mountain over cloud
that’s a long reach but when you moved down
the street past the café I thought this was fate
the way we kept in contact for years and after
four years you agreed to a date and we drank
and ate at Bodega where we talked for three
hours about your new nursing career and you
told me how you breathe air into patients and
care for them night-shift but you still want to
write fiction and memoirs but with memories
still ahead not experienced fast forward three
years I’m driving Uber and pick you up randomly
you’re with your lover you tell me you’re sick
of your sick patients you’ve run out of patience
and furthermore you were miserable in the era
we hung out backtracking not because of me
but because you never left home now I have a
lover you’re excited to attend my book release

 

(originally published in The Virginia Normal, 2018)

M I N T

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

We wandered the meat-factory-
turned-art-gallery, white wall to
white wall, wondering when to
dispel our abstract selves–
positive, negative, we followed
lines from canvas to grate where
blood of cattle used to drain,
where old concrete holds imprints
of feet. My hand sank into yours
that first time. I still see it there.

 

(originally published in Cold Creek Review, Spring 2018)

Fantasy After a Few Good Dates

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I’ll enter our bedroom to open
my laptop where I reserve
a French five-star dinner and
yes we have kids in this dream
the universe theirs to explore
so they start by clanging pots
and pans in the sine band of
our kitchen underbelly worlds
smaller than the space we used
to enclose the first time beneath
the orange blanket hot chocolate
wafting from the kitchen slunk
into pillowcases and snug before
the sun steams yolk in the black
pan gathers its yellow around
the edges waiting patiently to
rise

 

(originally published in The Wire’s Dream, 2018)

Mortality as First Date

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

The chairs we sit in are steel
horses, sad and dead. What you said
at the gallery in the warehouse was
to you, I have only given death and cookies.
Or corpses confused with candy.
Your cheeks puff, withdraw.
You’re silver in ceramic.
If I were a romantic I’d say
you belong in the painting.
Longing, always. But I am
a romantic. When we strolled
the botanical gardens we found longing
in the plants deemed poisonous.
How close I get to each sweet thing.
How close each is to death.

(originally published in Pif Magazine, 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)

A Date with Doubt

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

You look around the room
and rate singles from one to ten
in terms of melancholy
but don’t know
how to rate yourself–
Pacific waves flow through
you almost drown
in the sea of your thoughts–
the scisms between pen and mirror,
heart and mind, these are thieves
who will lie to you ‘til the Greyhound
leaves for Cincinnati at 11:30.
Until then we watch superheroes do bad
stand-up comedy in the conference room
at the new Mikey’s, eating mushroom pizza
with too-hot sauce. Bass pounds from the stage
so loudly we walk to 16-Bit next door
to drink water and pretend we are drunk,
our mouths rocketships exploring the universe
of each other– the rotation of stars
confused with physics. In the end all you want
is chocolate cake. Your blue eyes curve away
in that soaring flyball-to-left way. The way
you sway me back to simpler times
when buying CDs was a holy act
of personal preference
and I stayed sealed on a shelf in plastic,
waiting to give the world my music.

 

(originally published in Zingara Poetry Picks, Summer 2017)