Jake Rose is a poet, artist, and educator living in the California Central Valley & making too many websites. you can follow on instagram @jakerosepoetry ︎
01. PARASOL
we were strung out then friends or more
I can never guess what’s in between
a person’s hands when they hold them
around my throat pulsing like a note
in a bullfrog’s brain a slow pop deflating
we switch being under one another
and a stain on your shirt distracts me
a little bloodspot of morse code stutter
like the beginning of a poem I could finish
as we lay here in bed turning like fishes
believing was easy what came after that
was difficult when you ask me what happens when
we die I say I don’t know how to
be more truthful in less fragments
the customs that will survive this century
scare you but they don’t scare me
and that’s not detachment it’s somatic
the sky at night looks like a bucket of nails
and foam gathers like white flies to the ocean
I studied these landscapes all my childhood
since I was seven and heaven appeared
in the dense edges of my winching organs spilling
out the likeness of what I could not contain but
hoped to become through
some kind of idiotic insistence the wrinkled thumb
of your foot swells against the floor
and my hand sags like caesar stabbed & woozy
how do you identify beyond human
is usually my first question then how would
you choose to be unmade I used to throw up
because I was afraid of leaving my house with
its white stucco walls and crooked roof corner but
now I can’t even find that familiar fear
again & I miss it dearly grief is a superpositional
state and I’m not ready to just completely bare my
brutish soul but also how can I not be at this old
there is just the endurance of passing through each
anticlimax and trying not to trust other people’s
imitation over your real pain now if we fuck a few
times I’m not saving you
and I don’t think that you need to be saved
we were strung out then friends or more
I can never guess what’s in between
a person’s hands when they hold them
around my throat pulsing like a note
in a bullfrog’s brain a slow pop deflating
we switch being under one another
and a stain on your shirt distracts me
a little bloodspot of morse code stutter
like the beginning of a poem I could finish
as we lay here in bed turning like fishes
believing was easy what came after that
was difficult when you ask me what happens when
we die I say I don’t know how to
be more truthful in less fragments
the customs that will survive this century
scare you but they don’t scare me
and that’s not detachment it’s somatic
the sky at night looks like a bucket of nails
and foam gathers like white flies to the ocean
I studied these landscapes all my childhood
since I was seven and heaven appeared
in the dense edges of my winching organs spilling
out the likeness of what I could not contain but
hoped to become through
some kind of idiotic insistence the wrinkled thumb
of your foot swells against the floor
and my hand sags like caesar stabbed & woozy
how do you identify beyond human
is usually my first question then how would
you choose to be unmade I used to throw up
because I was afraid of leaving my house with
its white stucco walls and crooked roof corner but
now I can’t even find that familiar fear
again & I miss it dearly grief is a superpositional
state and I’m not ready to just completely bare my
brutish soul but also how can I not be at this old
there is just the endurance of passing through each
anticlimax and trying not to trust other people’s
imitation over your real pain now if we fuck a few
times I’m not saving you
and I don’t think that you need to be saved
︎ adultgroceries@gmail.com
CARGO COLLECTIVE, INC. LOS ANGELES, CALIF. 90039—3414