#Major Jackson

[firstfullmoon]

It must be the supermarket in me, all lit from inside, full of wide aisles and thoughtful shelf-stocking where you’ll find my feelings and memories. That’s why on the outside I look so ordered and put together. My inner supermarket contains an old-world butcher shop and fish market. Shoppers arrive with an unfathomable hunger which I relieve by offering freshness, quality, and value. Some are penniless and can only fantasize, licking their lips at rows of artisanal cheeses and meats behind glass display cases, the clothbound bries and goat, at ropes of cured salami and prosciutto. Still they taste. I offer free samples at stations throughout my supermarket so people will come to know and like me. In the produce department, many test my pears and avocados for ripeness. In the floral area, they sniff. Some walk off with my bouquets. I contain cheerful baggers who will escort you to your car. At times, truthfully, I dislike this about myself, forever accommodating. I’ve not always had a supermarket in me. It began when the church in me lost its congregation and when I lost my mother’s love to cocktails and other stimulants. There is no place for anger in my supermarket. I keep it in the backroom with a sign that reads “No Trespassing: Employees Only.” It’s a way of being in the world, a self, full of checkout lines and refrigerators, until someone runs through me, knocking down my pyramids of canned goods or panic shopping, leaving empty aisles.

— Major Jackson, “It Must Be the Supermarket in Me”

[newsmutproject]

Your whole body agrees you’d rather lie here like a snail in my arm’s crook, nude and oblivious of all e-mails. Yes, it’s nearly one o’clock, but we have more reasons to kiss, to engage in small talk. For one, these blissful seasons are short, & tomorrow is never insured...

from “Aubade,” by Major Jackson

[hillhousebi]

major jackson, ode to everything

[havingapoemwithyou]

It Must Be The Supermarket In Me by Major Jackson

[blogdemocratesjr]

[the-final-sentence]

The dead corn stubble burns bright with style.

Major Jackson, from "On Again, Off Again"

[manwalksintobar]

Life During Wartime // Major Jackson

But the daydream collapses and time returns us to corners where hustling boys expire like comets at the suburbs of your thalamus. Gunshots weaken the houses; hope vanishes like old cellphones. Blood darkens a stoop; the mouth is disagreeable. But then, one late morning, a sunshower baptizes shadows on a street. The steaming scent of a wet sidewalk ordains your stylus, and in a lot not far from here a girl in braids grabs the wrist of a boy, running through a cloud of rubble.

[lilislegacy]

it’s the fact that when percy and annabeth graduate from their high schools, annabeth’s estranged family is gonna fly out to NYC

which means there will almost certainly be an awkward dinner with both families.

“hey we’re the chases, the family who neglected, gaslit, and emotionally abandoned annabeth. but we feel really bad and we’re trying to do better.”

“hey we’re the blofis-jacksons, aka the loving family of your daughter’s boyfriend who took her in and loved her as our own after you neglected, glaslit, and emotionally abandoned her.”

except none of them actually say it. they’re all just thinking it.

sally has major mom beef with them, paul is trying to be nice but is skeptical, frederick feels guilty and awkward, mrs. chase is flat out uncomfortable, the twins are causing absolute chaos, annabeth is a wreck, percy’s making jokes every 17 seconds to attempt to diffuse the tension, and baby estelle is just vibin

i feel like a lot of wine would be consumed

[mutar-in-lucertola]

On Disappearing, BY MAJOR JACKSON

I have not disappeared. The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is full of my thinking. An archbishop prays for my soul, even though we met only once, and even then, he was busy waving at a congregation. The ticking clocks in Vermont sway

back and forth as though sweeping up my eyes and my tattoos and my metaphors, and what comes up are the great paragraphs of dust, which also carry motes of my existence. I have not disappeared. My wife quivers inside a kiss. My pulse was given to her many times,

in many countries. The chunks of bread we dip in olive oil is communion with our ancestors, who also have not disappeared. Their delicate songs I wear on my eyelids. Their smiles have given me freedom which is a crater I keep falling in. When I bite into the two halves of an orange whose cross-section resembles my lungs,

a delta of juices burst down my chin, and like magic, makes me appear to those who think I've disappeared. It's too bad war makes people disappear like chess pieces, and that prisons turn prisoners into movie endings. When I fade into the mountains on a forest trail, I still have not disappeared, even though its green façade turns my arms and legs into branches of oak. It is then I belong to a southerly wind, which by now you have mistaken as me nodding back and forth like a Hasid in prayer or a mother who has just lost her son to gunfire in Detroit. I have not disappeared.

In my children, I see my bulging face pressing further into the mysteries.

In a library in Tucson, on a plane above Buenos Aires, on a field where nearby burns a controlled fire, I am held by a professor, a general, and a photographer. One burns a finely wrapped cigar, then sniffs the scented pages of my books, scouring for the bitter smell of control. I hold him in my mind like a chalice. I have not disappeared. I swish the amber hue of lager on my tongue and ponder the drilling rigs in the Gulf of Alaska and all the oil-painted plovers.

When we talk about limits, we disappear. In Jasper, TX you can disappear on a strip of gravel.

I am a life in sacred language. Termites toil over a grave, and my mind is a ravine of yesterdays. At a glance from across the room, I wear September on my face, which is eternal, and does not disappear even if you close your eyes once and for all simultaneously like two coffins.

[castingmysilver]

"I am a life in sacred language,

Termites toil over a grave

And my mind is a ravine of yesterdays."

-from "On Disappearing"

Roll Deep, by Major Jackson

[largethingslargerthings]

Meditative Week of Poetry: Major Jackson

Give me the fashionably linen-clad scoundrels and dreamy radicals lounging poolside in a Hockney painting. Give me those whose damp freckles vibrate along jawlines like flairs of innocence. I want virtue to descend like the beauty of a lemon tree and to gasp at least once a day at the miracle of vitality that is my friend’s smile. Money has no cadence here. The wardrobe of the rich is like an imperial shadow that covers the history of gun trading and masculine footsteps. At five in the afternoon, my first prayers return to the zest of my mind where no tundra resides. Give me yellow cornfields and villas above Costa del Sol. My whole world blooms like a theater of exotic flowers

[ofswordsandpens]

the fact that the biggest smile we've seen on Percy's face so far is when he's petting that little lizard thing is just so

[hellofeanor]

Can 2025 maybe be the year we as a fandom finally stop using the term 'she-elf', which was invented for the Jackson movies and comes across as intentionally derogatory?

Tolkien himself referred to female elves as 'women' or 'elven-women' or similar.

[havingapoemwithyou]

ode to everything  by Major Jackson