Writing a Break-Up Album in the Underworld of Los Angeles
parking garage stone and yellow emergency
the microphone’s metal web against my lips
to vomit last year in haphazard dollops
of song, wolf, and waterfall dry music
career in loneliness this lifetime achievement
many-tailed and thick porous semiconscious
rambling strummed brown fingernails clacking
away at my hard reverbertion of longing the car
window closed to keep the sound in
Passing Claudia
in this city is a familiar intersection /
brick / unlike the old: stone / spotted
your doppelganger waiting the stoplight
/ stalled behind a truck and called your
name / as I drew closer / turned green
you waved back / could not halt my car’s
slope southbound after hello / goodbye
all acquaintances become ruins / friends
who shift faces / places to call home first /
my mother’s / my skeletal wandering to
belong / shell possessing consciousness
beneath acacias / humid summer of moss
between the cracks of historic buildings
in this city my heart is polluted
driving in circles everyone talks
about the same thing love weather
politics rain this summer gone
in a flood another day awash
in the lust pitter-pattering
off the black hot concrete
incalescent the days we
drive in circles around
each other, lip symbols
tiny trinkets the tiny purple
piggy bank I bought for you
from a quarter-slot machine
in a mall outside Youngstown
James Croal Jackson (he/him) has a chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017), and poems in Pacifica, Reservoir, and Rattle.
He edits The Mantle (themantlepoetry.com). Currently, he works in the film industry in Pittsburgh, PA. (jimjakk.com)
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THE CITY KEY 