Diego

on a street corner, in eugene, your inability to articulate, lack 
of some other way to say, pine tree—cold grey, interspersed 
with bursts of blue or yellow, curb sketched to define a street 
not yet created, but realized, in context—there is no painting 
of red roofs, no quote from a bible, lao tzu, or bhagavad gita 

diego

on a street corner, in eugene, selling books on enlightenment, 
but this is enlightenment—your awareness of all that is until 
it dissipates—white tie, black labrador, a beautiful woman in 
a turban a hue of green you’ve no word for, perhaps the colour 
of pine—a definition, realized in the context of no definition 

diego

a branch of pine alive but thin, not snapped by, but in motion 
with, the wind—a cosmic dance that chances to blow the hat 
off of his head, and you in chase [the student and the teacher] 
who hands diego, all smiles now, his errant purple hat back—
and the flat, black slate of the blackboard’s equation is erased

Stephen Jackson lives in the Pacific Northwest. A finalist for the 2025 James Tate International Poetry Prize, aimed at the development, celebration and promotion of contemporary Surrealist poetry, his poems appear in The Branches: A Journal of Literature and Philosophy, fourteen poems, Prairie Fire, and the Washington State Queer Poetry Anthology.