My love, I want to show you this strange moon:
a quilted wine and blue, half the charcoal sky–
but you are playing a game, a Crash Bandicoot

offshoot where you are a humanoid frog who jumps
and spins across 3-D landscapes. I ask you please
come outside there is a nervous crowd gathering

for this cosmic anomaly. But no one dies because
I wake and recall my childhood summers spent
on the cold, brown, teddybear carpet of my basement,

hands on controller, eyes mesmerized by polygons.
My father would slowly descend the stairs then ask
me to walk with him–as he often did the last

years of his life–that there was a whole world
out there, the world, and if I would walk once
with him he would show me, please, just once.

James Croal Jackson (he/him) has a chapbook, The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017), and poems in Pacifica, Reservoir, and indefinite space. He edits The Mantle (themantlepoetry.com). Currently, he works in the film industry in Pittsburgh, PA. (jimjakk.com)