Jules Jacob

Drive

Flying by my son’s old baseball fields
nascent thoughts sucked
through the sunroof
with the air conditioning,
a perfect memory resuscitated
of a strong seventh inning swing.
Boxing it like his golden
bubble wrapped trophies,

I’m driving faster than the pain.

Sixty second news flash:
eighty-seven degrees, slight wind
attack in Kabul kills ten
Spokane historic cemetery
coming around the next bend.
New deaths, old deaths, lost sons
pop my favorite CD mix in—
Alone, Pennies from Heaven and
Tom Petty’s Running Down a Dream.

We’re going wherever it leads.


Glass Sponge

Your sixth birthday
is a token held tightly
in a secure pocket
of my consciousness, safe from
your spite and destruction
your droopy eyed swaying stance
your consuming desires
and drug store alliances.

You resuscitate my heart
with trust and clever lies
to watch it stop again,
like a sea sponge injected
with endless amounts
of salt water tears
tainted with pharmaceuticals
and membrane clogging chemicals.

But I am a glass sponge love
made of silica, thriving in the sea
rapidly conducting electrical impulses
capable of living for 15,000 years
incapable of shattering on the reef
or forgetting the memory
of you
on your sixth birthday.


Seeds

Hope finds the open window
the break-crack-rift;
she drifts into
addicts and innocents
illegals and the illustrious
the homeless and insane.

She weaves around
anxiety-worry-fear
to plant forgotten seeds
in assorted cultivars,
forgiveness-new job-new toy-good deed,
any variety she needs

for the pope and pedophiles
the CEO and the centerfold 
the abuser and the bruised
to wake from
their nightmares
and rise again in the morning.


CP

Jules Jacob lives in the Mark Twain National Forest and serves as a child advocate for the Thirty-first Judicial Circuit of Missouri. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Huffpost Women, Frogpond, Four and Twenty, The Binnacle and Grey Sparrow Journal among others. She blogs at www.redroom.com/member/julesjacob/