by Jacob Griffin Hall
Love Song for "Georgia on My Mind"
Two unrelated things
can share a name.
It’s inadequate to say
all’s well that ends
at all. Two people
toe the basketball court
dusted with snow.
I take a picture,
replace it
with another picture.
I don’t expect
the song
but it comes.
Tenderly.
On the Beach You Took My Body to Mean More Than I Meant with My Body
Instead of death, an unused burgundy
casket. Instead of truth a thing
I refuse myself, but allow
the rooms I inhabit. I’ve thanked so many
people. My love grows
and falls, as if hypnotized,
into the water. I’ve lost my nerve
and been better for it.
You, my lack of nerve, are a hypnotist
and God is waiting for us
on the ridge where cedars yield to oak,
where I fall asleep without you
and choke on wild berries,
staring through the branches at the sky.
I’d like to believe everything I’ve lived.
I’d like to watch without a care
the passing blankets of fog
and tongue them all just for the chance at it.
Actually, as I remember,
I stood between August and September
bowing to the sober light.
You said to me, these are the women
I could love. I said to you,
these are the men
whose bodies turn my flesh to flesh.
You held the surf
between your shoulder blades,
made the waves a bed.
Jacob Griffin Hall was raised outside of Atlanta, Georgia and lives in Columbia, Missouri,
where he teaches and works as poetry editor for The Missouri Review. His first collection of poetry, Burial Machine, won the 2021 Backlash Best Book Award and is available with
Backlash Press. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, New Ohio Review, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, New Orleans Review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere.