Today I will sitin the grass and smellthe sunlight. I will leavethe pills in their bottles,I will leave the bottlesby my bed. I will walkto the insane river. I will letthe crazy wind cut and curvearound me. I will closemy eyes and dreamof medical sewagepoisoning the river a hundredmiles upstream. And somewherein all that trashthere is a little hitof morphine. I will thinkif nothing ever leavesthen the wind is fullof all the smoke I ever blew.And if nothing ever leavesdoes that mean I’m stilldopesick at fifteen, tellingmy parents the flu is going around?If I am then so what.I am also walking through the cemeteryat dawn, friendson both sides of me—our littledrunken army marchingout of the night.If I am, then so what. I am alsolying in my bed at twenty-two staringso deeply at the bark beetle-riddled treesthat I don’t noticethe vacant light lessening thenleaving entirely. I don’t noticewhen the night climbs into my bedlike a terrified brother and the windslams the door.
Poem with a Smoke Cloud Hanging in It
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- July 4, 2023
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“Poem with a Smoke Cloud Hanging in It” from WINTER STRANGER: by Jackson Holbert.
Published by Milkweed Editions on June 13, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Jackson Holbert.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jackson Holbert lives in Oakland, California, where he is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. His poems have appeared in Washington Square Review, The Iowa Review, and The Nation. His first book, Winter Stranger, won the 2022 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions.
"Holbert’s poems are emotionally generous. They blend accessible language with imagery that feels familiar yet beguilingly strange."
—Kevin Canfield, San Francisco Chronicle
"Winter Stranger uses spare language to portray a Washington countryside beset by hopelessness and addiction."
—Library Journal, What to Read in 2023
"Succinct but uncommonly far-ranging, Winter Stranger crafts a pliable style from an amalgamation of sources [. . . ] Its stranger achievement is the fashioning (or warping) of a sense of time unique to American poetry. Holbert’s titles sketch a universe where everything happens far too often or not enough: symptoms recur like seasons (“Another Summer Withdrawal Poem”); necessary words never get said (“Unfinished Letter to Jakob”). Holbert’s narratives hinge on catastrophic change, but the word he pronounces most tragically is “stay”[. . .] few debut poets have such a clear-eyed sense of how much—or how little—their poems can do for them."
—Christopher Spaide, Harriet Blog, Poetry Foundation
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