That’s the title of my “OpEd” piece, which you can read in Louisville’s Community newspaper.
The article grew out of a Zoom talk I gave to Louisville’s Temple Shalom.
I want to thank Lee Chottiner, editor, for publishing the piece. I also want to thank Rabbi Jacowitz Chottiner of Temple Shalom and Lee Chottiner, for inviting me to give that talk.
You can my article online, along with one of my poems.
I have three poems featured in The North Meridian Review: A Journal of Culture and Scholarship, Volume 1, Winter 2020 Special Issue. These are three “letter poems” from my chapbook manuscript-in-progress: Letters from Spickert Knob.
You can read the issue here – thenorthmeridianreview.org/past-issues
LOL – this is not a poem I’m ever going to send out, I don’t think – so I’m sharing it with you. I promised to do a generative exercise along with my poetry students based on an assignment called “Twenty Little Poetry Projects” by Jim Simmerman in The Practice of Poetry. The exercise has 20 random instructions for constructing a poem, such as “9. Use an example of false cause-effect logic” and “14. Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.” You never know how weirdly letting-go the results will be. So…enjoy the strange! – mj
Sasha’s Flight
By Michael Jackman
Our garden is a hamster stuffing
weeds in his cheeks. The tomatoes
dare the chickens in the run,
frightening them by spitting
seeds and tomato juice. Fat chickens
shriek and huddle in the coop.
Sasha, a Barred Rock hen, wishes
she lived in Jeffersonville, Indiana.
The tomatoes didn’t dare the hens,
they were flirting, but dinosaurs
have never understood this gesture.
The huddled chickens lick each other’s
tart feathers.
When will the highway grow quiet?
When will the neighbors silence
their polluting porch lights?
At night the light coats the collard greens
like an endotoxin. The highway’s tritones
curdle the corn and they try to cover their ears.
The sound bites their sensitive silk and chews
through a number of kernels.
Breaking dawn makes politicians chew onions,
grinding the teary skins all over God’s green acres,
as onion skins are the diaphanous shawls
of rhetoric. Politicians mend fences with wire cutters.
Sasha, the Barred Rock, discovers
flight one day and beats her beak against
the netted ceiling until she breaks free
to join a flock of wild turkeys running uphill.
Jackman never sees her again, though he will search
the knobs of Floyd County, finding only splats
of her particular green guano, and he will call,
“Sasha! Sasha!” to the scolding of crows and coos
of mourning doves. The situation will be derelectly
novel, as he knows willows are the arbiters of hen
grievances, and the forests call, “Sasha, cherie,
fais comme chez toi!” On cold winter nights,
even the chert will light her fires, with one spark.
The tomatoes spit, corn wails, lights ooze down
the sides of collards.
In 2002, I was a frequent guest writer and columnist for a Louisville, KY magazine called The Snitch. With the rise of concern about prison education reform, I’m reprinting this article, which is still relevant. It first appeared in The Snitch of Louisville, August 15, 2002, under the title, “Teaching Inmates the Hard Way.”
(more…)I still own a 2007 Honda Fit Sport, a fun, lovely little car that’s versatile, has good milage for a gas-burner, and a rabid fanbase. Believe it or not, it was my first new car purchase, and I was so crazy about it I wanted to write about my experience.
Back when I worked as an editor and freelancer, I had a friend who owned (and probably still owns) Autochannel.com. I pitched him A More Perfect Fit and he took me up on the Honda Fit column. I was delighted when I discovered that my old columns were still posted. I still find them relevant, so enjoy.
This column has links to the others: “Toward a More Perfect Mileage”
Singer-Songwriter, Multi-instrumentalist, Writer