Jackson Cross
“Orbiting [the Natural World :(is Expectant, Violent)] Disaster Makes Us Fear Collapse”
Green
I.
Dreaming of green Tam
-pa Bay it’s sinking there’s a
Jay squalling in my
head my ears hear the thrum of
open ocean ridged like cockles
II.
I can feel thee breezing
sun-steamed palms extend green
tinted equi
-vocally gleaming
behind my eyes like
Li-Young-Li – Man
h’ain’t I got
spirit today?
III.
I feel hunger
inviting hunger as to
Macaw’s blue; hyacinth flower
-ing inviting squaw
-k! I imitate
squawk!
Red
IV.
There is yet – yet there is
gore a man
trembles
hind the wheel
SUV :[engine swirling]
I see him duck
like a deer was shot
a boxer’s shot in
-visible it’s sinking
him
trembling I see his blood
-stained face diamond
truculence car horn honking
– horning – like a flock of
morning geese
and the black oil pooling
underneath
like a pitch like tar
the earth whence it was
water-birthed
in mourning he
ducks right arm arching
like he’s swimming
overwhere his head
making landfall
his palm extends
out the window
as if
the other would
follow
as if
another
awaited
V.
6 man auto collision split
open interchange lanes
curve like women’s
figures tire
tread flesh
-ing south
seamless scorch marks
skipped chords blaring
her skin inked thorough-way past
:[downtown-
Belknap st.]
bellicostic
high-pitched
disaster traffic
would drift
away
Drifting Tributary to My Day-Lost Conscious
VI.
In another dreaming mirrored in the fractured pane he caved,
Voyeuring
the death of another shattered the crash accident and
the horning.
Unfurling,
unasked an image of smooth chrome oblivion¹ blight flesh memory
His hand
brushing a woman’s bare thigh bare leg crotch the smoothness of chrome
Bushing
rotor shaft swirling the natural world collapsing the body uniquely female
The earth
uniquely female the gawp of a mammalian howling the thought as predatory.
Men polluting water as to blood the natural resource exploited.
Remorse the faultline embodied abuse and abandonment. Reassemblage of the
elliptical nothing
ends.
The waves thrum into me his head caved in. He smashed beading into me filling mine.
With pauses. The birdcalls. the shoreline. not yet still not yet ceasing. Only sinking.
¹ What is oblivion and why do we have a word for it?
Jackson Cross was raised in Florida and Texas. He earned B.A.s in Cultural Theory and English in 2024 from the University of South Florida, where he served as editor in chief of Thread Literary & Arts Magazine. Jackson has worked in commercial and industrial maintenance since 2023. He currently resides in Houston.