Resort purple palm trees on your tank top pink fingernails clutching milkshake you sip sun drenched Polaroid aiming into brick wall red curtain in the breeze palm trees sky behind you all of the future in front Wrap Party at Arsenal Bowl Last time we were in this spot, we broke glasses. on the real-or- fake (which is it?) marble table. In my memory, the entire room is burgundy. wine- tinted, but I won't let go, the conviction of all that spilled that night, my mouth, my heart, the sticky nature of the surface that we had yet to place our hands on. I Used to Dream I’d Get So High Last night, I dreamt I stood on a tall stack of books, gathered with others around a roof like we were at a dinner party. When I glanced down– finally, from the top of my tenuous skyscraper, I had to brace my shoe against the house to keep myself from falling back into reality, but I did anyway, repeating to the guests anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. I used to dream I’d get so high, anything was possible. I entered a tower, beelined to the elevator, and pushed the button to the top. Sometimes the platform was already ascending. Sometimes the whole structure was. When the doors (if they existed) parted, the view from the sky was so rich, I had to be dreaming. Deep tree greens. Eternal ocean blue. I returned to this view often, but stopped near the end of my twenties. I was itinerant at the time, my life still an open road ahead of me. A million meanings yet to interpret. Not yet bogged by a steady job but not quite steadied, living off the promises of strangers and the engine of my Ford Fiesta, emitting exhaust into the atmosphere, accumulating.
James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. His latest chapbooks are A God You Believed In (Pinhole Poetry, 2023) and Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022). Recent poems are in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Little Patuxent Review, and The Round. He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (jamescroaljackson.com)