hope

Church

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Before you had a name, you were a stranger
searching for one.

Gravel, asphalt, salt, and stone–
I pieced you together, a church from scratch,
your holiness in my uttered breaths
of limestone, mortar, love…

your tall steeple stabbed the sky.
I could hear clouds dissipate,
crows caw and congregate
in our mutual worship of you.

Maybe you never needed a name.

When you vanished, my heart
reconstructed itself with God’s rubble,
compounded from type-two plastic,
Coca-Cola cans, rubber bands…

I never learned your name. With my mouth,
my body aflame, your steeple burned.

Bricks and timber screened
the sky. The smoke and fade–

the gray, the fog– that
was your name.

 

(originally published in Pudding Magazine, Winter 2016)

Ruins

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I.

Bullets ricochet
in every entered home
and they are similar
to ballet, a delicate

do not fall wherever
you cannot stand back up
but pirouette anyway– every room
spins the opposite of you.

II.

Hair on the surface of bleeding
bricks. The house of
violent storms. Mortars
with every step.

III.

Heaven, the insurance premium,
costs far too much.

IV.

We are legless because
we cannot stand. Wingless
because no one believed
we would fly again.

V.

During construction,
no one built us for the long-term.
There are nails in every crook
of skin– every place you look.

 

(originally published in The Black Napkin, Summer 2016)

Night Train in Wait

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

We stare at stars until we feel
the cavalcade of stones shift beneath our shoes.
There is an entropy to the universe.
What melody does the rail hold in her ivories?

Do we listen for an engine to ignite
while we tangle in the grass, in the cold,
in the tremble of tracks? Where else to go?
We tremble, too, waiting

for a song from the vulnerable rail
and her sharp of distance.
If the train will not move I still want
to create landscapes with you

and callous ourselves hurtling
past engine content in her still
into worlds where I become wind,
and you, fire–

with a palm on your cheek,
we’re the mountains,
playas, beaches, moors.
All a blur. A quiver.

 

(originally published in Isthmus, Winter 2016)

Clutching My Stomach in the Bathroom

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

in front of the mirror wondering
how you made it through those nine months
to get nothing but condensation from a cloud
yes the smiles returned in the desert
when the scythe allowed we spoke truths
and asked everyone to provide thirst
because we were the cacti with reservoirs
of lust and destruction
laid out in desiccate flowerbeds
our wallets filled with zinnias
while we were filled
from the green of living
sometimes we are horses
galloping along dirt paths
and westbound highways
hoping they lead to ocean
but it leads always to night
to hunger
we barely know how to be raw anymore
how to sink dead teeth into apples
and want the core
our thin gums only cling to our mouths
because there’s nowhere else to call home
no more words that can make you
believe in a future

 

(originally published in Picaroon Poetry, Summer 2016)

The Universe Necessarily Sends Metaphors

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Swathed in bedbugs, draped
in the gloom of willing hearts
in collective song maddeningly
swept by enkindled starlight obscured,

fate sprouted flowers along
marshy graves and windtorn spokes
of the ethereal wheel of coincidences,
salvos brisk and violent, precisely when
the window-dead moth inched baby-bug steps,

when you plucked a magic eyelash
from a crook in my face, the numb
morning heat of your breath whispered,
in translation, morose and umber.

Now we wait, sanely, eyes closed,
for all the other things I wished
to bear gold in streets we walk
at night, hand entwined in yours.

 

(originally published in Glassworks, Fall 2015)

From Mother

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Live a long life, son. Eat noodles on your birthday.
Al dente. Do it every holiday, so I can live on long

past done spaghetti which sticks upon the wall,
frozen in time against the whims of dun sodden

dust and entities beyond the sounds of crying
from the bathroom at 2 A.M. beneath the black-

dripped canvas of luminous lights. The grass, uncut,
reaches far now above the frizzy tips of your hair

 

 

(originally published in The Birds We Piled Loosely – Issue #1)