Jackson Wills

4 poems
from Heaven is a Gateway Drug


Dead Honey

Death is large. The honey falls into the honey,
bright glass maggots catching light

This first draft of doomsday
is reassuring, the undesirable wow muted
if death is honey going home to honey

The technical and yellow daffodil became devoid as acid

I see according to that temperature under the senses

To be midwifed by bees into silence
would be sweet after the sense had faded

 

Lush Livelihoods

Is it warm like a moth?

likerous liflode her lykam to plese

I am only interested in documentaries and allegories,
lush livelihoods pressed together

An allegory is two documentaries played at once,
one of which is invisible,
lush livelihoods

The soil is sour with clouds

Now for the skeleton review

Get out the vote, yes, but possibly more
importantly, get out the bullet

which is warm like a moth
like a mouth
like a mother

 

1-7-23

Eucalyptic thoughts lead me to sleep

Cutting grass for the sheep for the winter
I convulse down the mountain
in someone’s younger arms

Your fox spiral loves you

The apple sauce dance continues

1-7-23
Spare the horses by the sea

The defensive sparkle of gummosis on the peach tree
at its base two years ago
glitters the memory

The glitter has dried out and fallen off

The tree survived

Smell the sharp mustard flower
in the winter garden
In the dark

Yellow hinting smell

In dark

Yellow scenting

In dark

My mentholated heart tingles out into your limbs
The mustard blossoms secrete melatonin in the winter garden
with no relationship to sleep

 

Cherry Week

Peach petals fallen
near the wild iris,
cherry week is over

already

The Japanese magnolia has started to bruise brown

Defunct docks drop themselves into the estuary

The stoney smack of the turtle
jumps back in

Horse toes don’t live in water

It’s a beautiful day, I want to snuffle it up

The orange beach made of blasted scrap metal
looks up to the bridge on the bay

She pulls at her skin
like an uncomfortable shirt

The bubbles like pearls I’m forgetting
before

the peach’s pink screen peeling with season

Film of your life is like living without any obligations,
without any nerve endings -
I don’t panic over her mouth this time around

I would lie in windy beds on afternoons

A mold piles like soot on sprigs of beech

We meet them where the forest goes

I hoard these images from a sickness at time

 

Jackson Wills earned an MFA from Iowa and a PhD from UNLV. Early versions of these poems and all work in the collection first appeared as video poems in Instagram posts; they are documentary poems of his life. If you would like to see more initial poems before they are remediated to the page and separated from their first images, follow him at jacksons_username.