Poetry by Jacob Fowler

dog tail dreamline


there is a type of surfing only adults can do:
indifferent, pale yellow like the bottom of our boards.

                                             when I was young, every night I had a dream that my grandfather died   and when he finally did
                                             I started surfing
                                             to find him in the sheen
                                             promised by sparkled sunlight blasted
                             against the blackened sea

last week, a wave ripped my body open
and placed clay where my
organs used to live

I weigh twice as much now
and move in blocky,  jerked movements

                                                             clay is so dead but loves to play alive

it sits there
in accented tans and browns
and won’t be satisfied until
it fills all of me and most of my mouth

my tongue used to be just a tongue,
and a tongue, wet with cool after a drink of water,
rests on itself and lists the endless loves
of butterscotch memories

but now it’s
a molded clod of clay
heavy like the sky,
sunk in my mouth,

lapping up salt water
as if life was born
from salt rather than silence.

salt water now
means what is
played with,
made a me toy
made my drop
of a body
consumed by a moment

played, and falling into
the stink of a greening ocean I--
I sink so gracelessly

and let the weight of
ceramic memories
of a dead man
drown me so softly





drive


“I can drive, drive it fast now.” - Lil Uzi Vert

I can drive
I can see
I can see through the sand that stings through my skin
I can see the biting the biting

the back of a hand can be broken in so many different ways

I am a backroom like backwards
where the fragility of my body mocks me

I will protect myself as much as it is allowed
but sometimes it’s so much safer to be a coward
in the dark
in the tautness of backing out
in the moist corners of mouths

                                                                              I am rarely governed by light
                                                                              I move often based on sound
                                                                              and find myself in the driver’s seat
                                                                              like one finds themselves ripped up

but I can drive
under the little nights
I can drive
away and back again
I can drive

and I will throw myself into every road before I forget that ​




ditches


ghosts, who demand so much of our compassion,
crinkle into themselves at the first whiff of intimacy.

in the desert, where everything is stretched out
so comfortably, ghosts dance like ditches

ditches that turn into cars and back into ditches,
ditches lost only in themselves

                               in the desert, there are these iridescent
                               blocks of white wine, thirty stories high

                               magic like weathered lizard magic
                               like spots on the back of your eyelids

                               these blocks, shimmering in their own heat
                               are not ghosts but they stink with death

in the desert, everything is camouflaged,
pride is hunger painted as itself, and

and hunger is the conductor of an orchestra
without instruments

hunger is the space between grains of sand
and the watered down blocks of silence

                     all my friends are in the desert
                     waiting for a knee deep moment

                     reminding me that moving is
                     easier than leaving

                     and leaving should have happened
                     years ago

but I love the bay
I get to pretend
that every ghost
is just a voice
and that every
voice is water
burned bright,
filled out,
tired,
and in love with me

                              in the desert:
                              folded / ghost /
                              diagrams
                              dream only of themselves

​

Jacob Fowler (he/him/his) is an elementary school teacher living in Oakland, CA. He recently graduated from Pitzer College with a BA in World Literature. His work has appeared in Barren Magazine, Selcouth Station, Soft Cartel, and Riggwelter Press, among others. You can find him on Twitter @jacobafowler.