time

A Poetry of Place

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Because Tony once said he knew
Columbus and Los Angeles the way I do–
I have not yet developed a poetry of
place for Pittsburgh. Three years in and
still the surprise hills, the way I always
feel– still– an outsider wending my way
through confusing streets. I’ve worked with
Kailee’s dad longer than I lived with Paige
and still we haven’t had a deep conversation.
Everywhere I go there remains a sense of some
thing deep that needs explored. The way
I walked Los Angeles streets at night–
the endless sprawl– must be the same,
but Pittsburgh’s smaller, the graffiti
more familiar, how it’s all a sketch of home.

(originally published in Vilas Avenue, Winter 2023)

Late-Summer Saturday, 2021

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

we walked a horseshoe through the Strip
ginger whiskey coffee whiskey honey whiskey apple whiskey
no matter what I always see this brand-new city

slamming glasses into a blue-skied table
what’s passed around we finish swiftly
while friends attempt to maintain some order

never too early to rush into a burger order
time being what it is
we consume all we can

(originally published in DREICH Magazine, Fall 2023)

Anachronism / Angiosperm

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I’m trying to tell you
          I’m trying

                                 my petals’ attempt
at opening

                  an articulate tongue

    the phylum anthophyta

                                  glass breaking in the sun

I am Late Jurassic
   early Cretaceous

                                   it’s true I don’t belong
here among your desiccated peonies

I plead bee telepathy

          antennae

                          someone read
                                              my mind

before the era ends
                                  before I swallow

pyrethroids

     over ensuing millennia I can’t promise
                                                       I will adapt

(originally published in Ginosko Literary Journal, Fall 2021)

Countdown

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Vodka I would glug from a wound
on my forearm, health preached and instructed.

I said I saw a liver pumping liquid from the sky
but the crowd called it cirrus. I could not differentiate

lust from love, not in the waning daylight,
not when I am trying to make it

the rest of the year wanting to forget
its starting incident (the backyard pond

shimmering in the moonlight amidst televisions
of confetti). The public countdown ends

at zero but I keep counting, never an end in sight,
always with my eye on the next

golden apple to descend into a crowd.

(originally published in BOMBFIRE, Spring 2021)

Christmas, 2017

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I heard last year Uncle Keat
lost his sight, and nobody
has seen him since.

Tonight, my oldest brother– waiting
on a kidney, unable to walk–
unwraps a flashlight.

A gift of hope, I suppose,
what we lose we tend to replace
at the end of a year–

the longer Dad’s dead the wider
entropy’s net consumes us.

Today’s the fabled white
Christmas, trail of footprints
leading into the woods.

Somebody gray-bearded
and familiar waits in a clearing,
hands cupped to mouth.

There’s no warmth in
red streams of wrapping paper
hanged from winter branches.

Uncle Keat was there,
we’re sure. Somewhere
his tether.

As if another dark
world with open jaw
awaits, and time

pushes us forward,
wheels squeaking
every now and then.

(originally published in Overheard, Winter 2022)

In Another Life I Am Content Enough

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

What simulation’s numb you ask
if I want children this time

definitive we boil Kraft mac
and cheese. I toss our meager sweet

potatoes in oil and ramble about financial
self-worth the oven nearly at four hundred

degrees. I can’t stop petting your shoulder
the ashy cat roams in the loam of our love

our newly swept hardwood the house
our home for now so limited already

steam from the inside a pressure
cooker of different timelines. What river

these converging lives to seek meaning
in the biological job postings some of us

are born to call. My dad was sixty-one
when I was born my grandfather clock

ticks nonexistent. We have gorged in all
our broken cabinets to rustle the blue

plastic grocery bag pile. I can’t stand
to live another day preoccupied.

(originally published in Flights, Summer 2021)

For M.P.N.

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I wish I still had time to write you letters
but I am stuck between branches with heavy

workload. I want to commit again to art, at least,
to singing songs with you on the beach under

natural harmonies of seagulls. The forest froze
under another frigid season, so I come to shore

in a long trench coat, alone, held firmly between
two worlds: the one in which I don’t have time

to do everything I want, and the other, in which
I still don’t, but keep your words dangling close.

(originally published in Academy of the Heart and Mind, Winter 2021)

The Current

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

There is a universe where I am
a barista or videographer or marketer

or astronomer. I could have said no–
I skipped an interview– when you asked

if I would come to Palm Springs. When
you said you know what this means if you

go, I could have pivoted and returned
to painting my rented room in sadness.

This matters. This doesn’t. This cyclical
current. Of course we’d split, even after

you said– eating biscuits at the bakery–
the universe gives what you put in.

Yes, perhaps. But I am alive, formless,
confused as the river flowing opposite,

a flight response to a hurricane I would
never fight. I stayed in Seth’s basement

for a week after. Who walked upstream
out from it was never relevant, anyway.

(originally published in CERASUS, Summer 2021)