water

Bro

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

Get out of my life with
your election signs. Don’t
tell me what stakes
you stuck in your front lawn.
Come on. I know you’re not
a boomer. You say we’re at
a crossroads and I gaze
into the neighbor’s yard–
used to be bushes concealing
every outside path. Now there’s
someone on a lawnmower severing
the bonds of grass, in intervals,
each direction I look, each time
I visit home. And we comment
each new motor makes it harder
to reach each other. Mom’s
neighbors want to beat the rain.
We just built this fire in the back
of my childhood home. These
bundles of sticks my mom gathers,
waiting for us to come home
some early October Saturday.
At my brother’s first mention
of herd immunity, my sister
suggests we seek more kindling
in the tall grass. The air is
parched but we must keep
burning. Firewood left from Dad’s
death we’ve already forgotten.
My brother says we’re gonna
lose all this country fought for–
Dad survived World War II
only to shatter his ribs on a fire
hydrant sixty years later. Mom
would not let the coroner dig
into his carcass for an autopsy.
In his later years, Dad would keep
a hose beside our bonfires. Still,
we hunch over heat together,
burning hot dogs on forgotten
skewers. We dredge the past
again: a year after my father’s death,
cooking hot dogs over walnut husks,
one of you said there could be
an industry for the timbered taste
coating the tenuous meat we’ve
shared over the years.

(originally published in Alternate Route, Spring 2023)

I Convince My Mom to Write

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

For a time, I convinced my mother to write
mini memoirs of her farmer childhood
in the Philippines. In one, a monkey bites
her during a nap in a hammock; in another,
she falls from a tree onto a snakebite,
and her father tosses her into the Pacific.

This morning, she tells me of
leading a goat on a rope
up a hill. At the top, it starts to rain
and the goat runs back down.

I tell my mom she should write this.
She says, no, you should.
So I ask how did you feel
being dragged by a goat?

My mom looks to the ceiling,
patterns of neural pathways
on a sea of white.

She says, I wanted to cook him
for dinner. He scratched my arm
I couldn’t untie the goat from the tree
to eat grass but he didn’t like rain,
he smelled rain, smelled the smoke
out of the fog, the smoke up the mountain
smoke from where the ground is so warm
it evaporates, and you hear raindrops, the wind
blowing while crying the goat was very strong,
when you’re a kid it feels like a water slide
only no water on top of hills going down
trying to run – in the Philippines that’s how
it feels when you get dragged by a goat, she went into
water – jumped into the river – a forever pool – rock you jump
over it’s deep – after rain and flood washed out all dirt
when water turned clear back when I was kid – like after
the flood no leeches would come with leeches I hollered
and nearly stabbed a leg with a knife – neighbor cut
his leeches and his leg – plenty of leeches in our river – flood
clears leeches – flood clears everything – the flood will drag you all
the way to the ocean

(originally published in Hello America Stereo Cassette, Winter 2022)

St. Petersburg in January

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

maybe it is not seeing-eye dogs training
in the grass I pass or the street vendors
selling sunglasses tamales and watercolors
or the waves that touch a difficult nerve
which snap me into a more relaxed reality
or the toaster-oven croissant at the French
bakery on Ocean Avenue but the cranes
that lift off skyscrapers in the heavy wind
that make me want to punch real estate
developers in the jaw or somesuch non
sensical violence bear trap tourist trap
somewhat Floridaesque my happy life
on blast it is dynamite at a luxury
construction site this weekend

(originally published in Artvilla, Spring 2023)

What Else

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

On a towel eating Lays
at the shore of Lake Erie’s
ocean-simulation but I just want
to piss in sand
singing memories of Los Angeles.

Sorry, the masses I abandoned.
What song of salt on tongue.
What rustic swampland.

Nothing
about the tide I claim
to understand. Water’s not even
clear. Only unexplainable shifts

of the heart coming
and coming at me relentlessly
like I never settled when it mattered.

Now I prefer deepwoods drugs.
Life’s a slow death
and I just need to get to the end.
           (go)

What else do you want / what else
do you want / what else do you want? To do?

go

           go

go

           go

                    go

(originally published in Spotlong Review, Winter 2023)

Trust

/ James Croal Jackson / Leave a comment

I did not listen to my inner
monologue when it told me
to stay home and watch

The Novice. I went to Trace
Brewing when it was bright
but you sat in the dark

when I needed light. I
said one drink, one drink
only, then on the two-block

walk back the clouds
were down, they felt
attached to you and

I kept stepping on
plastic bags and
scrunched-up napkins.

To arrive home I had
to bisect my conscience
and wait: how much

of myself to give
after giving?
The water tower

in the distance
a perpetual blue
balloon.

(originally published in DoubleSpeak Magazine, Spring 2023)

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)