I do not want to sleep I want to get smashed
but I fall asleep it is Friday my youth
is waning. Please tell me every time
you want me there. I love to say I
will think about it. And I will. To
feel if the sun will warm the air
enough to drink gallons the death
of me. I want you to nail me
down I want to stay in bed I want to
surround myself with hanging lights
and loud whiskey-drinkers and dance
around smashed Bud Light bottles
gleaming with the force of recent
desire– someone leaving their
own temporal body, someone
leaving their wallet behind,
someone leaving the world
so damn lonely now.
At Crazy Mocha (Shadyside)
I don’t know what you’re saying–
I was just baptized in sensory deprivation
saltwater. You took an Adderal
to live in your tornado of case papers,
clacking away at the keyboard buzzing
with school sentences I do not crave
to understand. From the speakers, jazz
dances uneven through honeyhive fluorescents
above us. I scoot my chair in closer
to the table, and there is a squeak either
from my movement or a clarinet falsetto.
Sometimes the world is synchronized;
sometimes a miracle I make excuses for.
I held the planet’s limestone on my neck
when I was afloat– it became weightless.
rust goggles
art began as a war against walls
everything in a painting was in danger of being lost
every object that has been moved every one
that has been smoothed every piece
outlined was once a living breathing being
water can dissolve rocks
paint on a canvas can bruise
an audience can be traumatized by art that is not lost
intertwining history with the present
is the divide between
good times things
and bad times things
good times being the sky painted with eyes
and bad times the sleepless nights we want
a different kind of archive
art being our act of evasion
Grandview Heights
I need this walk through the suburbs
summer heat has me a certain way
lovers have me a certain way
I need to clear my head with the zen
of weedwackers droning, an SUV’s blur and
whoosh, lawnmowers torturing the grass–
white noise, white birds, white hybrids.
walked with white sneakers in the mud
last night drunk in the rain through an alley
Eggs Balloons
we inflated important
words empty laughs
being sound balloons
attached to inflatable
proppable hearts buy twelve
in a bag for a dollar eggs break
the yolks watch that grease
pour into morning pans
James Croal Jackson (he/him/his) is a Filipino-American poet. He has a chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017), and recent poems in DASH, Sampsonia Way, and Jam & Sand. He edits The Mantle (themantlepoetry.com). He works in film production in Pittsburgh, PA. (jamescroaljackson.com)
