#jackson holbert

the 26th birthday poem by Jackson Holbert

Winter Stranger, Jackson Holbert

My mother was around all the time back then, always walking in and out of rooms carrying stacks of  laptop computers. She spent most of  her daylight hours blowing dust out of circuits, fans, motherboards, daughterboards. Sometimes her little canister would die and she’d have to use her mouth. My father was gone all day every day getting repetitive stress injuries at the newspaper. He was a journalist and everyone hated him, even his friends. Nothing really happened during my entire childhood so he ended up spending most days shooting paper footballs through a miniature goal post he kept in the locked drawer of  his desk. He was rarely kind. And in the few, short instances he was, it still didn’t seem like it. Something about his mouth made everything he did seem either sinister or inept. He was completely inscrutable except for a period in the spring of 2004, when he was just sad. I was young that year and my sister was older. She came home from college for the whole summer of 2005. I was 14. She told me not to worry about other people, not to worry about war, not to worry about a thing. That was the greatest summer of my short life. I had no friends. Oh I had people I talked to at school but once summer hit it was like every school bus had crashed headfirst into a wall except the one that was carrying me and my silver trumpet. I had that tall kind of  joy that you can only feel when your bones still have another few inches left in them. My sister and I would watch three movies a day and never go to the lake. Everybody says it seems like summer never ends until it does. But that’s a lie. I knew so little back then but the one thing I did know was that all my friends were coming back and I would once more join them in the hallways, in the classrooms, once more join them for hours after school in the far part of  the parking lot and would continue to do so until I turned 16 and got a job cutting my fingers on the cheese grater at the Pizza Factory. After that everything was all work work work go home Jeremy get your feet off the sofa  Jeremy work work math homework band-aids and on a good day a little trumpet and on the best days all trumpet. I wanted my life to be about music but in the end it was about getting B’s in subjects such as Spanish. I don’t know, sometimes it feels like those summers really did never end, they went on forever and just got progressively worse. We like to pretend that one day we just walk into our adulthood like a congressman walking into the ocean, but we all know that’s not true. What really happens is we walk into the same building day after day, but every night some crew comes in and replaces something little — a lamp housing, the chair of a conference table — until nothing is the same, until the building is not as we remembered it at all, until the building is stronger, up to code but a lot less fun, and the lighting, the lighting is fluorescent and obscene.

— Jackson Holbert, from “The 26th Birthday Poem,” in Winter Stranger

Jackson Holbert, “I AM 17. I HAVE A LOT TO SAY.” from Poetry, June 2024

JACKSON HOLBERT

"The Christmas Poem" from Winter Stranger by Jackson Holbert