I worked too much this week

and will work too much the next.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is diminishing–
I’m in the office sixty hours a week.
How was I supposed to know
to gaze into a distant glint?
I haven’t seen a star in years.
If not under a canopy of clouds
a canopy of smog.
If I had a kid she’d be grown now.
Instead our world is warming and
I drive down the street each day
guzzling jugs of precious resource–

we’re waiting on the water wars.
The water wars are now.

A Forest

In the beginning was lake
salt on our skin, wind deep
breathing with us in grass.

That was years ago, when
the woods were as open
to being endless as we were.

I want to be lost again
in a labyrinth of pines–
fighting our way through

cicadas singing lovesongs–
to find the water, and
emerge needing your air.

Tetris

I am reading old journals, putting
pieces of my past in place–
a series of staircase Tetris shapes,

a broken board mixing L.A. palm
fronds with bad haircuts Dad
gave me, but we needed to save

money, and I was bratty. I wanted
video game anime hair but got slanted
bangs laughed at by classmates and

teachers (who would never admit they
found it funny). I knew, and still do.
Sharp laughter edged in memory. I

want to say I’ve gotten over it. Over
all of it. But I still hold the smoky
gray of Nintendo controller in both

hands, and I am trying to tell the pieces
where they need to go– but I am
older and life is faster, blocks falling

into places I can no longer find them,
stacking dark spaces to the top of my
screen after these earlier, easier years.

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 Sampsonia Way, San Antonio Review, and Pacifica. He edits The Mantle Poetry (themantlepoetry.com) and works in film production in Pittsburgh, PA.
jamescroaljackson.com
paypal: jamescroaljackson@gmail.com
venmo: @James-Jackson-12