Meat Trees

June 28, 2023June 26, 2023 / James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

             This is a binding between nature and mankind
             unexplainable through philosophy. The trees
             want to reclaim us or, perhaps, themselves.
            -K. Santiago, “The Whispers in the Wild”

World Cup – athletes at their peak
when the affliction struck.

Crushed leaves in snot on tissue –
it’s nothing. I was Ubering people

around Columbus, heard the chatter.
Can trees grow in brains? Is the new

trend snorting deciduous?
I tapped the CNN app– first it was

a world-class saxophonist struck
down with a green cold.

Next, football stars from Paraguay
and Russia, all blowing chunks

of trees into white, softer trees.
The first doctor to log a patient

said it’s nothing to worry about.
After a week the test showed invasion:

prickly pines a long spine in the nose
and the headlines bleated MEAT TREES!

It was early morning in the haze
of dreaming when my nose dripped forest–

I wiped my hand across the stream,
the flecks of blossoms blooming.

(originally published in Cough Syrup Magazine, Spring 2020)

Hive

August 3, 2022August 2, 2022 / James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I rented an apartment of bees
that first year in Los Angeles
sticky buzzing day and night
stingers past the turn of knob

sunny day the bees hovering
over body encircling you
paranoid optimistic dreamer
don’t leave the hive yes stay

get stung camera rolling and
action as in stasis as in days
wrapped around you burning
August blankets dripping lust

for fame everyone plays the
game gathering in droves to
hot stove hands on surface
level interaction as in in-

action

(originally published in Chronogram, Fall 2019)

Dream with Patchwork Moon

May 25, 2022April 16, 2020 / James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

My love, I want to show you this strange moon:
a quilted wine and blue, half the charcoal sky–
but you are playing a game, a Crash Bandicoot

offshoot where you are a humanoid frog who jumps
and spins across 3-D landscapes. I ask you please
come outside there is a nervous crowd gathering

for this cosmic anomaly. But no one dies because
I wake and recall my childhood summers spent
on the cold, brown, teddybear carpet of my basement,

hands on controller, eyes mesmerized by polygons.
My father would slowly descend the stairs then ask
me to walk with him– as he often did the last

years of his life– that there was a whole world
out there, the world, and if I would walk once
with him he would show me, please, just once.

(originally published in Vagabond City Lit, Summer 2019)

Let Go

February 3, 2021November 7, 2018 / James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Let go
of Los Angeles.
Of the shore
or the dream
of water. Night
sky the black
granules. Negative
film reel. Prints
in sand. Bare
feet: where to
wander
next?

Dream with Hurricane

July 26, 2020July 24, 2020 / James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Florida’s coast the horizon gunmetal
and the gales drive me into a house
where I ramble in garbled non sequiturs
about God highways marijuana to a cop
whose intent is to arrest me but he says
he does not have the authority yet
I say you’ll get there then after
the wreckage the cop works as a clerk
in the city’s only shelter I ask
if there’s room and he says not yet

(originally published in Hollow Tongue, Spring 2018)