In Another Life I Am Content Enough
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.
DREAMING OF NEW ORLEANS
bowl-shaped city I just wanna smoke
come hurricane season
look now Mom I’m gone
inside all the jazz I never listened to.
I’m gonna stay home and hear the blues
because I had a light notion in my brain.
I’m standing in different spots in this room
to see where my shadow is grander.
Over in the corner I blend into darkness.
By the window I just look outside at the wire
fence and dream of living in New Orleans.
Party on the Precipice of Change
Photographers on the lawn snap life guitars green mutated bees we swing on the buzz bin of Eden matchmaking pollination we seek old holes to crawl out of swishing vodka comes potato new spuds supplant the hunger
James Croal Jackson (he/him) is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. He has two chapbooks, Our Past Leaves (Kelsay Books, 2021) and The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017). He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. jamescroaljackson.co
Flight of the dragonfly 