dating

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)

Float

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Presently I am restless.
The television’s flickering
from the bedroom distracts
me from my mind’s reruns.
Last night, I learned to float
on my back for the first time.
It’s all about the ears, my teacher
said, but I am thinking about
her hands– how she held me.
My lower spine. Right leg.
The night before, on her couch,
our kneecaps sat a centimeter
apart, enough to receive each other’s
heat. I recalled a video in which
two water droplets in close proximity
refused to stop reaching for the other,
tirelessly wobbling until
losing strength. Perhaps we
both have been dating others for
too long, afraid of the aftermath.
In the pool, she let me float
into the purple dusk beneath
the bright, orange moon. I was
an egg unformed and drifting,
a body in transition shifting
wherever the pool dictated.
I cannot predict where shooting
stars appear in thin atmosphere air,
nor how far they’ll go, only that
they are doomed to disappear.

(originally published in Raised Brow Press, Summer 2020)

When you say exclusive do you mean we are alive alongside the only other life in the universe or

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

do you mean something else
because right now I am committed
to the rare magic of water its myriad

forms        fresh   salt    rain    ice
but don’t you go change too
much on me I feel so small

in the emptiness following days
without you   being in the pull
of your invisible gravity what

a dance to be so meaningless
years away from all other heat and
made of fragile things   carbon  dust

yet when I fart and sneeze through
the night I still have my body
and you intact in morning light

 

(originally published in former People, Winter 2020)

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)

Zen of the Clattering Ceiling Fan

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

These Tinder dates and hookups.
Teeth kisses and unfamiliar homes.
You count cold days and they are circular.

There’s a blue hue from the window.
M snores in unison with the universe
of her bedroom. I can’t sleep, so

I become the fan. After some time,
transcendence is the blade that cuts
through stale air, makes the room breathe.

 

(originally published in The Bitchin’ Kitsch, 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)

The Apple and the Moon

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Newton knew the force of a desire
determined the severity of impact.
If you want an apple, the thought will travel
far to haunt you. Calculus was invented
to make sense of your absence. Such
is the memory of July: Beach House
in dim lighting, your bed beside the stairwell.
One could almost roll over and…
walking up those stairs the first time,
you were not there, but searching for your
cat outside, later found hiding in the ravine.
You wouldn’t let me stay, not yet.
I would carry silence into
waning days of weeks then feast
on all the words you spoon-fed me.
I failed to boomerang magic into our
silent field, unlike our first date: cheap
chicken on the patio of World of Beers,
talking what it would take to unlock
our true selves. You called Colin
to buy molly, though I’d never
rolled. Like everything else,
that plan flaked and you never
thought of me again.

 

(originally published in Man in the Street Magazine, Winter 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 Man Bears Beliefs as a Tree Bears Apples”

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

 -Ralph Waldo Emerson

pleading with a red delicious begging god for good
even though I cannot process Jesus I still chew and
spit seed and you walk over the guts of me with your
shoes on sidewalk in the sweltering August of laying
in grass whispering love between dandelions so much
we’re sprouting from dirt in ugly ways all thorn
and bloom overgrown with each other there are
no gloved hands around anymore to pull us out

 

(originally published in Bluestem, Spring 2017)