Holding up a gloved hand
like a photographer blocking out
the scene, he almost catches
all the tack weld sparks.
One flashes a quick zero 
on his arm, tallying up
the days-since-last-injury.

Just where he was welding
Rayanne had scrawled in Sharpie
saying this length of steel 
would be the right front trailer arm,
due last Tuesday. Her ink
would be sandblasted off next station.

When the oven door opens
a column of the lightest sand
swirls like midges under the lights
and the guys in their hoods
track grains out onto the floor, 
extras coming offstage
from shooting the desert ambush scene.

Through the side door, the creek
is doing management proud—
its gray-blue curtain 
spreads out so evenly 
that try as he might, his lighter
and the sun are properly damped
and he goes back to the line unburnt.

Morning 15

Cardinal flying its pyre still lit
into a tree’s bland gulp of green

Snuff

Stutter
	After Jericho Brown

My tattoo has a half-life in that stutter.
Rocks cordon off this grass like accent marks.

	Rocks corrode in grass, lost like your accent.
As my father, you were brick and mortar.

As for your father, he laid brick and mortar 
Around the well of the infant brother.

	Into the well of the unspoken brother
	Your sister one day dropped a baby shoe.

Some sisters keep the Monopoly shoe
In case the family sits back down to play.

	In case the family sits back down I’ve laid
	The table so you won’t face all the photos.

Your table’s set for the living, so I’ll cover
My tattoo as it stutters half your name.

Stutter

Sexy mermaids

happywhale.org collects whale porn:
orca-bitten dappled flukes raised up
to meet the long lenses of citizen
scientists, kayaking out to trespass on
Leviathan’s yard and get
their shots, exchange the latitudes
and timestamps, track the beast
until its range and ways and moods are known.

The URL’s forced intimacy
of dread and emoji 
marries infantile need
to elemental force, asking
this weather-front of blood and breath
to quick evolve its fin-bones 
and give them a big thumbs-up.
That krill sieve of a mouth will do
for a smile.

Somewhere on the perp-walk
evolutionary tree
of silhouetted Beast to Man
these cross-hatched halfway figures 
beckon to be loved or feared,
coming out at the Spirit of 
Halloween store.

Sexy mermaids:
décolletage and platform boots
recall the violence of their making,
wedded by whalebone corsets
that cover the unseeable middle place
where scales exchange their cells with flesh,
and tiaras and bikini tops 
reweave into great tails  
that might casually put out your eyes.

Sexy mermaids

Dance Recital

If one thing goes wrong on the Merritt Parkway
it's over—red lights for miles like frosting 
on the birthday cakes of Greenwich and Westport.
So we might get shunted north onto I-84,
its hills and tractor-warning curves from an earlier age
of roads, winding below Danbury where my grandpa’s folks
once ran the Style Park hat factory, 
and it’s usually dusk by the time we pass
the Sandy Hook exit. 

When it happened, our kids
were four, seven and ten, when the world
needs to be set into order, pegs in place
like the passengers in the family car of Life.
Once, in family therapy, we mixed it up,
moving the wooden chairs into three rows 
to make a minivan inside the office.
Stuck in the “driver’s seat,” turning around to see
Mom and Dad squabbling in the back with way 
too much verve, our children learned the limits
of power, and that the person in the front is alone.

Year after year, every time we pass that road
I can’t help but see the first graders that remained
walking in line across the playground, their hands
placed on the next kid’s shoulders, as if the schools
still had dance class to teach balance and grace. 

The day after was our children’s Nutcracker 
in the middle school. After I dropped off in front
and went to park, a toddler darted towards my bumper
and his mother’s hoarse cry filled that space
of terror that had been newly lit up all around.

The tinny “jazzed up” Christmas party beats
shuddered the whole audience
and the children became rats and waved Chinese fans.
It was the best tribute we could muster
to a school so filled with blood it was razed:
such loud music; so, so much candy.

Dance Recital

Elementals
At the Natches River outside Tieton, Washington

We walk up through sage and kindling, 
holding our breath in the heat
before we meet the river’s icy fax 
unrolling down from the glacier.

			    	      My three children
bind the day’s scrapes and burns with the water’s
cool cautery. Maybe the last time they’ll jump
into anything together, before the tattoos
collecting in their phones start to emerge 
onto their goosebumped arms, wind new skins
around their ankles, up to their legs and ribs. 

In the refracting thornbushes rippling on the water
I see the gardens they mean to till
upon themselves: 
                    a “sibling snake” across
their wrists wards off those beer drinkers downstream

pink cacti catch the oak leaves from the rocks

the stylized fur of flying cats retains
the nectar and dew we passed this morning—

queer pictograms they’re flying up the pole 
for those who know to read the flags. They want
out from between the dumb old opposites 
of fire and ice. Fiercely illegible, 
their whole selves signal through this light
in wavelengths flared beyond my sight.

Elementals

Robin Red-breast

They were utterly,
unquestionably not red: 
the pantry of English in the 1500s
a root-cellar with apples and roses
preserved in jars for the winter,
red the only thing available to name
this most plentiful of birds, an error
carried to North America to misname
an equally orange, unrelated bird.

In a time of plague, the robins’ vigor
seemed almost excessive, that spring
when they sprinted across streets emptied
of all except masked pedestrians
in the first bloom of COVID paranoia.

In our own cellar we had bedded
down for the season in rolls
of toilet paper, boxes of yeast,
everything in place for a year
or more of isolated plenty. 
But under the forsythia
and across the wormy yard,
the robins seemed to know everyone, 
side-eyeing jays and squirrels, freed
from the sudden death of cars and Roundup.

Each one had a faceted array
of rust and gray across its chest,
fluttering ten times for each breath
I held to molder inside my mask, 
if you could even call our breathing 
by the same name when robins fill
their air-sacs first, then their lungs,
oxygen flowing even through their bones
as they fly to chest-baring vantage points,
although they only sing from the ground.

[Photo credit: bryanpfeiffer.com]

Robin Red-breast

Visitation
March 2020

It started as Dad’s first Zoom birthday—
a big one, odometer thunking hard—
he & my mom a few miles away
but huddled on my laptop 
with a sad cake on each table
because all we knew was to keep away
& point the camera at each other,
when we saw their chandelier rattle
as a bat flapped through the room
& they ran screaming to call 
the Animal Warden (locked down too) &
told me to come now plague or no plague,
so I pulled up & googled “bat in the house”
& held the door open like we would
for Elijah, prophet half-expected
to drop in at Passover for some wine & 
bring redemption for all, 
& from the darkened house
I felt the bat fly past my face
into the weirdly warm drizzly night 
looking for the fruit of this new season.

Visitation

Skunk Cabbage

Looming up from a mossy stage
comes a horned headdress,
audience screaming as they glimpse
their death metal hero rising from below,
dry ice steaming and SKUNK CABBAGE
flashing in fat red lights,
the name a gas attack on everything lovely, 
this plant like a tiny Viking ship
surging onto the beachhead,
a whole squad of them pushing up 
the marsh’s guts with their
purple egg teeth, crowbars wedging 
apart this gray fatigued macrame 
of dead reeds to make way for bloody spring.

Skunk Cabbage

http://jsjacobs.scripts.mit.edu/evenjoshknows/2014/09/remembering-aaron-and-others-this-september-11th/

A Prezi for the departed

 

The mourning template has a pleasant face—

It melds inviting blurs of voicemail clips,

Stray photographs, the downloads from the dead. 

 

The face becomes our starting point. We click

This eye to follow one loss down, from who

(We hear the wedding speech), to what (the plane,

 

The cancers), to the living. Quarter-turn: 

We trace the mourner’s path from boom to now: 

Our view pans over impact statements, blinks

 

A flashback like a strobe across the page—

And then we bounce, yanked forward to the next

Departed, all the g-force metered out

 

To give that first-day kick, the next years’ drag,

And drift us to “conclusion” at the end. 

Oh Prezi, logo-shirted Virgil, steer

 

Along these rails and never stray: for if

These dead are not yet ours to mourn, this dance

You lead, so briskly guiding hands and knees

 

In painted steps along this path, is one

We all start from the floor. Your glib bright hand

Is what we have to grab to follow on.

 

September 2014
A poem by Josh Jacobs. 
©2014

A Prezi For The Departed

Off season

You dug up the dahlia tubers
and put them in shoeboxes 
to winter in the garage beneath
a drift of recycling. 

They were gnarled and stained,
narrow alien hands ready to play
a game of three-card monte:

which of us will be purple,
which of us will live again?

Josh Jacobs

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