Road’s Eye View
By Stephanie Jones
A welling
eye unfocused on a brief
mirage.
Relic of hard won
abandonment.
A living image.
Arranged to fade in someone’s
memory like an injured
hawk
circling
itself
on the highway. Light
through windows
illuminates quiet
tasks left undone. Grittled dust across
a kitchen floor. Mayflies
clustering. So much life
in dying. Paint
stripped by wind and
migrating loneliness. Leaving inky stains
on shingles. Unpatterned
tears.
Birds gather
copper
from wood and dirt
mad under an upturned ocean
ready
to collapse.
Do strangers preserve our
littered artifacts
somewhere
in their mind
or do we disappear
as fast as they turn their heads
and blink?
John Jackson, California, 2024, fujifilm 100v, 6:9.
Stephanie Jones is a writer with bylines in The New York Times, DownBeat, NPR: Music, The Detroit Free Press & more. Her poems appear in New Reader Magazine, Poetic Sun, 50-Word Stories, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Four Tulips (forthcoming), Sublimation (forthcoming) & Orchards Poetry Journal (forthcoming) and as a commission for Blue Note Records.
John Jackson is a photographer based in Southwest Missouri. His work documents nothing more than the world as he sees it. Being fortunate enough to travel extensively for the last two and a half decades has given him the opportunity to share the little things in life that mean so much to him.