space

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)

Limits

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

You know this laptop, this Android is more capable than
Apollo 11. The moon’s lonely distance. We hold such tiny

comforts in our vastness of insignificance. Circuitboards run
their own marathon and electricity flows through them. Me,

I don’t believe I am a spaceship even though we live on one,
cruising through the uninhabitable zero against all odds,

each of us wired with biological programming. Darwin,
am I your darling? And I am, and you are – the product

of the grass that tastes like cirrhosis to me, the way it dries
rigid in the sun after heavy rain. What I need is something –

someone – to clear my mind, to absolve my white noise
of hayweeds, the rumba of cardiological time. My heart

does not follow logic, it follows pheromones, the way each
pleasurable thing leads to the next until all pleasure has been

scrubbed raw from the stars, that their gleaming was
always my imagination projected in the faintest way.

 

(originally published in Confluence, Spring 2020)

Descendant of the Big Bang

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Self-absorption has turned me
into a selfish alien. On Earth,

we live in isolation
waiting for the cosmic dawn

to return in a brilliant explosion
that would rock this rock like

a great song
performing on its uppermost

stage, all of my being
expanding like a flower

until the whole universe
opens wide

like a Great Eyeball.
Our role will be to find

inexpressible
connection– a ring

of stars passing rings
of fire, each a small

cluster of blue petals.

(originally published in The Subnivean, Winter 2021)

The Uncertainty Principle

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Quantum physics have never been
more real than in this steaming
silver pot of Annie’s shells
and cheddar butter and milk
I’m cooking and the cat in our house
attacks crumpled-up balls
of paper yet sprints in fear
when a toilet is flushed. We are
all in orbit. You and me and
Earth and spoon in pot
mixing components into
tornado and I don’t know
where the melting butter
ends up nor the cheese
or where I’ll be in ten
years or a thousand
because our atoms
can diverge into
two paths any given
moment

          THE FIRST PATH

the one where you and I and most our friends and family are still alive
because ten years is a long time    someone both of us love has died
it’s my father I see dandelions on the dead a suit and tie something
he never would have worn & your mother her silky dress and
Avon perfume wafting through the wake      the frost her
permanent winter bed

          THE SECOND PATH

the one where you and I and all our friends and family are still alive
because ten years is a long time     someone both of us love will die
I see a bowl of ashes I see dead dandelions wilting on the stove
the steam carries souls up into my nose where I recall the heat
and depth of the Grand Canyon   sun pressing against my
neck Dad in his thick glasses & sweat     arms around me &
I pick up a stone & throw it over the edge

 

(originally published in The Courtship of Winds, 2019)

Submerge

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

From oneness: two, three, four.
Shadows through doorways.
Breath from water. Surface

bubbles, rippled sighs. The ocean
dried, became a city. Marine lights.
Pearl buildings. Skyscrapers so

old you can see the way the
world will end.
No one knows the space they occupy.

We fade in water. We fade
in air. We fade in living,
drown in life.

 

(originally published in Zany Zygote Review, Winter 2018)

 

Atmosphere

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

What you do say is prayer don’t burn and die
when passing through the atmosphere.

Yet, somehow, meteoroids do–
though sand-sized, they have bodies

like bullets, sometimes
copper, sometimes steel.

We’re talkin’ heaven’s ammo,
a hundred tons pounding Earth each day

unnoticed. Down here, you claim
able to speak with some cosmic, faraway force

you’ve never met while keeping closed your mouth.
You claim telepathy, so this telepathic ability

how your thoughts move healing this world
of the aftermath of bodies. Tell me:

how does God respond?
And you say God,

God protects the faithful.

So, God’s His own meteorites
cratering His house, hallelujah.

 

(originally published in Ohio Edit, Winter 2018)

Stand-Up Comedy

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

[the comedian approaches the stage in sunglasses
and a shiny black and green robe.]

Knock knock.
                        (Who’s there?)

I am.
There is no punchline.

Listen past your rush-hour heart.
I am up here breathing heavily.

Listen: I want you to laugh
and never stop. I am trying jokes
you did not know you wanted to hear.

I searched coast-to-coast for lands
who laugh with me, that tectonic shifting
from belly to chest.

Why did boys like me bring ladders to school?

We wanted to learn mountains and rarefied air.
To find reservoirs of laughter waiting.

What did 0 say to 8?
                       Nice belt!

                      (I don’t get that joke!)

But I want your holy, exhaled noise.
Relax.

What do you do if you see a spaceman?

You laugh. He doesn’t know what he’s doing here.
What he’s doing anywhere.
I offered myself to the ocean–
the entertainment industry.
She did not want.
The spotlight hungers for no one.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Why wouldn’t the chicken cross the road
if the chicken intended to cross the road?

Most everyone I know crosses the road
without looking both ways these days.
I do not call them chickens– they are my more realistic friends.

I want to make them laugh.
If you’re not laughing for me, laugh for them.

We are haunted by too many things:
dead friends, dead family, dead love,
dead strangers, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.

You can be someone’s haunting sunlight.
Someone’s champion jester dispersing their marbles too good.

Look, a magic trick!
                                   [he throws two playing cards onto the floor]

How do you catch a unique rabbit?
U nique up on it.

How do you catch a tame rabbit?
Tame way– u nique up

on something enough to latch onto–
just a hinge’s creak
before the mouth’s swing open, closed.

Some of us never leave that darkness.
The silent divide.

Laughter will bring us close.

I mean it when I say let’s laugh until we die,
even when what we laugh about isn’t funny.

I mean it when I say if you see a space, man,
park your car, man.

It’s over.

 

(originally published in The Magnolia Review, Fall 2017)

Kurt Says There Is No Such Thing as Information Loss

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

You can recover anything. If you can’t,
you will. What you seek exists
but has left for the black hole of knowledge
steady at the center of the galaxy.
You will become a different person,
renovate the house but keep the windows.
You will find a new lover but process
bits of data still there– the comparisons
and air hurtle toward end-time, the end
line unquantifiable by any metrics of the heart,
of time complete and incomplete starts.
There is a long black hair lodged in your beard
from a lover though the body has moved on.
You forget the names of things you know
but know what they are, how you can have mind
without soul but no soul without mind.
You can live a new life
without losing the old.

 

(originally published in the hour after happy hour, Fall 2017; also published in The Cadaverine Magazine)