Jamey Jones
SOLAR STORM
for Sotère Torregian
I’ve stretched Sun Ra month
16 days into May, which makes
it more than a month, clearly,
but I guess I like to hold that
magic as long as I can
no longer the splash-
down of my birth-
month
but still more than
a trickle from that stream
soft nudge of those
calmer swells
all manifestations
of the space ways
of the solar storms that make
the Northern Lights move
south until they eventually
are north once more
the whole earth contained
in northern lights
and this
my 60th year of circling the sun
60 times I’ve been here before
60 earth spools of cosmic threads
align wildly
to make
me
I picture my parents
laughing at this, in the most
loving way, of course
as proud parent spirits
familial ghost atoms swirling
about me with love
ever and always
with love
which is not thinking
has little or nothing to do with
thinking
they laugh and linger
all around
like southern northern lights
in my genes
I carry these ancestral strands
inside they live after all
and always in April
spilling into May
where all my questions
are really answers
and answers
are guides
who lead the way
how to be 60 and circle the sun
how to string sunlight on invisible string
how to play marbles on the moon
how to move forward in the poem
RED ANGLE CROW CALL
1.
sunbelt bell jar
bottle caps blue
lighter chips of
plastic pulled apart
by history
time travel
atomic unravelling
breakdown streams
2.
Indra’s net
I bet
we become
as wood
the word wood
wooded threads
if we could
crumble out
as air
3.
at first turtle shell
telling time
telling tributary
whose lips lipped
your tanned
gold filter
we are always
sifting through filters
what were you thinking
when you smoked
that particular planet
I mean helmet
I mean smoke
and were those
thoughts
filtered
4.
green propeller
from a feller
way down
yonder
left to ponder
the horse shoe shaped
sum of sun, moon
salt, wind, timely
earth spin
5.
black is
round, go get
your glue gun
bit by bit
bot by bot
bottle up history
those are my black lines
bundled together
on that velcro
the time has come
is it under shell
one, two, or three
UPF 50
yellow slow boat
no show
but over here
tiny ants slide
about in some
far away order
like the vibrating
football game when
we were kids
but unlike those
plastic players
these ants
have six legs that we
can’t see moving
which is why we
say sliding, sometimes
things are not what
they seem
6.
brown
string bean
aligned with the green
propeller as if from alien
hands, lands like some
dream pod dropped
on the shore after
being dropped
in the water
7.
her black shell oaths
take time to bend
Ozark dayglo
green oats, honey
memory
8.
red star
fish guitar
holds it
together
with bulbous cartoon
eyes
and plastic bag knots
sky stars seaweed
sand, white vetted net
we will swallow
all of this before we
go to bed
see what dreams
arrive
Jamey Jones is the author of Blue Rain Morning (Farfalla, McMillan and Parrish, 2011) morning coffee from the other side (West Florida Literary Federation, 2021), Under The Big Span of Small Regards (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024), as well as several chapbooks. His work has been published in Zen Monster, Fell Swoop, Mundane Egg, The Brooklyn Rail, and Brooklyn Paramount, among others. He is the editor of Rachael Pongetti’s Uncovering The Layers: The Pensacola Graffiti Bridge Project (crazy. silly. okay. 2016), and the faculty editor of Hurricane Review, the national literary journal of Pensacola State College. From 2014 to 2020 he was Northwest Florida Poet Laureate.
