Four Poems by James Croal Jackson

James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet working in film production. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Nashville, Tennessee. (jamescroaljackson.com) More poetry from The Feedsack is here.

Mess

Above our bed are spider webs
coated in dust. We swear it means
nothing, but you ask if there’s a crater
in my heart the rate we’re apart.

There is a giant window in this
room mucked with time. You cried
when Ted Lasso grew distant from his wife.
Best intention does not remove entropy.

You attempt an early sleep and ask
if I will tuck you in underneath
the twenty-pound blanket. I lay
it over you. I have much to do,

                                        everything
to clean.

Vienna Sausage Phase (at 38)

small cans snapping open
just a moment an eyedrop.

there is an ethical meat: my heart
yearns for the past, dad’s boiled

eggs. what can be over-
cooked. name a food

you could go into a room
of one hundred people

and ninety-nine of them
would call a blight

on humankind. charred
logs, pink dogs, not even.

in my cupboard thin-
brick boxes of pasta expire.

everything– with a chance
to oversaturate– will.

Stirring Oatmeal

I do it for my heart, whose brain
thinks of you often in the ugly
grain of soaking up the bad fats,
so sacrificial, so noble, the
boil bubbles a beehive
or a rowdy civilization,
one I spin in circles
and circles until I have
no choice but to open
my mouth and let you
go.

Another Night at Beyond the Edge

The water leaks out of the bottom of Lisa’s red
cup and we cannot get paper towels fast enough.

Instead I see inside me the person I have myself
been trying to hide. Watching Wembanyama playing

a not-himself game in the Finals against the Knicks.
I, too, feel out of body, though not as long-limbed,

nor as tall and capable. I did not think to train
with monks to learn mindfulness this last mountain

summer. Nor did I dribble a basketball skipping
rocks along the incline in the dark. The points

I score internal, no one recording. The southern
sun shines inside my eye from across the opposite

window as I try to watch one of the spider-eye
screens. I do okay enough. I can hear the game.

Earlier from my bedroom I wanted to be alone,
looking to the bushes the sparrows were creeping

in and out of. And somehow I find myself
sitting at a bar table with friends, Brunson’s clutch

shots sinking, he the shortest player on the floor,
still taller than me, the door to the patio open

letting all the smoke inside, inhaling it anyway.