Jake Bailey

Tipton Poetry Journal – Summer 2021

Thirteen Blackbirds

Jake Bailey

Another mouth inside me breathes. Everything breathes on the other side.

Listen to the woods and the pale colors embracing ghosts and the soft thunder of hooves in the distance.

Thirteen blackbirds fly over the ferryman, worn hands grasping rope like bread dipped in wine.

Another mouth inside me breaks into thirteen pieces. Thirteen blackbirds. The horizon. The fading light.

Blood pools in the back of my throat. Blood pools into a river threatening to carry this body across.

The ferryman drifts. The blackbirds fly to that place without a name.

I am afraid that nothing breathes on the other side.

Ghost of my Ghost

Jake Bailey

I was convinced that my childhood home was haunted. My father kept my grandmother’s ashes in a box in the hall closet, closet beckoning imagination to ruin.

A ghost serves as well as substance when absence becomes a stone. A stone serves as well as absence when it’s lodged in your shoe and digging into soft flesh.

An instant inside chaos painted to look like meaning, subtext stretched into fibers and woven as tapestries of faith. Tattered. Vibrant in their overtures. Symphonies understand the hollowness of a note and what rises beyond an outstretched hand. Matrix of sound. Sound of incarnation meeting pavement, a soft thud.

I’d pace before the door wondering what would happen if I stripped it of its hinges. What an opening looked like without a form. The collapse of a star. I asked my mother about the shape of God. If a leaking body knows that blood cannot pump itself by design.

Years later, my father scattered the ashes across a river, a ghost made water. Which makes up most of a soul. Aqueous. Untamed. In dreams, my grandmother asks me if I know what it means to be a man.

Yes, I’ve seen a mouth become a dagger, slice clean through bone. Yes, I’ve seen what becomes of a haunting.

She paints a soundscape before me, soft notes of what it means to end. Ghost birthing ghost. Absence revealed to breed nothing. Ghost of my ghost. Haunt me so that I may become a door.

Jake Bailey is a schiZotypal experientialist with published or forthcoming work in Abstract Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, Constellations, Diode Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry, Guesthouse, MidAmerican Review, Palette Poetry, PANK Magazine, Passages North, Storm Cellar, TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. Jake received his MA from Northwest Missouri State University and his MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles. He is a former editor for Lunch Ticket, current associate editor for Storm Cellar, and reads for Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts. Jake lives in Illinois with his wife and their three dogs. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram (@SaintJakeowitz) and at saintjakeowitz.xyz.