Familiarity
I don’t know you
but I must have, once,
in some other life, the same
one this timeline is a part
of, this forward motion
a shadow of a shadow
darkening everything
I believe I know
has obscured.
Steps
Years later you emerge to say– oh,
you were marginalia in the stampede
of time. Fine. Where
are the footprints? Developing
the rock we once said was us.
That’s the Earth. I’m garbage.
The erosion of memory
started with aluminum beneath
your feet. The sand–
such an ordeal
to remember the origin
of recyclables. I am a
weather system forming
my own thoughts about
the worth of a tornado,
how it whips the air
in circles to salt
the crust of distance.
Serenity Blue
praise the underwater statue
at the aquarium it looks like Mary
mother of– mother of– there is no
statue inside the mind standing
eroding inside spacetime what
a cliché (your reflection) magnified
you stare above into great white
light illuminating water’s new
life (forms of the past forms
of the past) sentient beaming
in its own extensive space
(how to fill the frame
of mind) where I want no
other self to suffocate
James Croal Jackson 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)
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