Graph
James Croal Jackson
I’m into overheads, shelves, island sprawls,
crawling around books before picking them up.
Trying to catch a glimpse of something broken or shifting–
I’m in these spaces to expose something beautiful,
to be drawn down into a point and turned into a graph,
digging hard for data not there, backtracking
to the beginning, seeking a thread
of writing, dance, or music, looking for chalk markings,
finding a new cartography of data and madness,
becoming, at best, a spider as my fingers brush
chalk on concrete, out to the margins
of garden, a rough outline of a new
map of air, a new art from chaos,
the grid in my hands bent to my will.
I can always find my center in a world I’ll never know.
James Croal Jackson is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. He has three chapbooks: Count Seeds With Me (Ethel Zine & Micro-Press, 2022), Our Past Leaves (Kelsay Books, 2021), and The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights, 2017). He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, PA. (jamescroaljackson.com).