Jet Fuel Review
  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
    • Masthead
  • Submit
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Submit Here
  • Features
  • Interviews
  • Book Reviews
  • Previous Issues
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022

Jim Davis

Man Kissing Boobs


Evening exhale of A. Finkl & Sons
steel smog, enhancing the North
Chicago sunset, and whatever it is


they use to tan the leather
at the Webster leather-stretch: Famous
Horween tannery smells like a golf course


outhouse, the neighbor’s dead cat
blankets – mechanic-me, why can’t I
look at a radio and tell the cloud to break


from a web of ostensible unphasing, street-
tough? Break, you beautiful storm, snap
like an aloe stem, juice me, rid me of that


city-stink, at least push it deeper down.
Pequod’s Pizza, where I learned new words
on the bathroom wall, contributed too.


Amazed by the electro-gas twisting
of halogen tubes, a purple whale balanced
on one fin, draught mug frothing in the other –

the start of parts becoming parts, symbol
soup, lewd collection of letters and limbs
crudely sketched. The intersection of boyhood


and everything else, where our waitress perked
through her shirt, where I ached out my first
pornography on the wall with a felt tip pen.



Tales of the Jazz Age


Ravenous within the bounds of business, the reproach
of two gerbils in a cage, how hungry she must have been
to eat her mate.
How many lives have I ruined? One
doubled in size overnight, the other became, by some gift
of this universal business, nothing more than a tail and some bones.


Sucking on silver polish in a room full of candles, fickle wicks,
a young boy draws the Predator’s meaty tusks and whiskers
reads a word like
preemptor two times in the footprint of a page –
how selfish the seizure of privacy in the intimate, how he prefers
the large intimacy of a party, men in bowties with lampshades


dulling the wan light of waning smiles. Indecency swings
from the chandelier. What ostensible parts asunder could be
worse than lightning pulled apart from its thunder? Forced to live
in the flash of trees falling alone in a forest – who can be sure
what’s been stolen won’t tear itself to pieces in the desperate


hope to find itself again? There are far greater times to be had
he assumes, sniffing the air for sawdust as a young boy
reads Gatsby in the basement, two gerbils squirreling in a cage.
Rancid, Black Flag, Operation Ivy, naive to the imminent
consumptions: crimson woodchips, lovesickness, small stack of bones.



Driving with Pizzelles

               for Michael Earl Craig


I have been known to bring snakes to the revival tent.
I’m trying on hats in the handcuff factory / silk scarf stand.
I’ll stick this thing square in the Geo Tracker, Megadeath
rattling the speakers. There once was a sort of music.

I’m in the lane to go left, steering with my knee, go straight,
trying to open a package of lemon zest pizzelles with one hand
and my teeth, checking cell reception, spitting gum out the window.
I am decorating my future motel room. A fat white Chevrolet

pulls up to pass, cannot, pulls back and signals he’ll put a bullet
through the window into my skull behind the ear. Today a man
removed his shoes, one by one, threw them at the president. I’m alive,
thank heaven, because of the pizzelles, peeled with my teeth

set the pack in the passenger seat. The man in the fat white van
has a fat wife waiting back home in a thin kimono she lets slip
as she bends to pick the paper from the stoop and the neighbor waves
and wipes his mouth and says
Hold on, I’ve got something for you –

they trade envelopes over the fence, mislabeled. Free radio
brings me news from Guantanamo Bay. A postcard from
Del Pabellon’s been through weather, cat-parts in the dumpster
behind the gyro stand. We live in a very sordid country.

I am trying on my motel furniture. I’ll rewrite most of the old poems.


Sunday Memo, Re: Joyce


Sliced almonds, dried berries sprinkled over steel-
cut oats at the window this morning, smell of thyme
from the planter. One small thrush pining over needle
placement: thatched sprigs and twigs of poplar, cypress,


hair and twine. The water from the tap is cold the way
spring pipes allow. Running over an apple, fingers still
numb and thick from sleep. After a series of bird calls
he’d like to name but can’t, he wonders: must he inherit


the strangely sound of consonants in Euclid’s use
of
gnomon, as Joyce suggests in The Sisters
or The Dubliners? So too with simony in the Catechism,
captured, in a sense, in the same story? In thrush-like


becomings and shivers of rose bush, he is convinced of his
ability to extract meaning from abstract sentences. Venial
sun, sincere and abundant, thawing the planter of thyme.
Still the winter’s white truculence has done away


with those who came together to escape the cold. Still
and all he loved her, in a small way. Shock and awe dissolve
to the quiet reverence of a man running his hands over an apple,
buffing it across his musty lapel as the tree-line lays blue strips


of shadow like the blade of a sundial announcing itself
upon the lawn like the sacraments of Joyce given
to those willing to listen. Dun-colored morning, coffee sipped,
stirring oats and working a new apple down to its core.




Ephemera


                                    Healthy children will not fear life
                                    if their elders have integrity enough
                                    not to fear death.
                                                                  - Erik Erikson


I used to know the story of why the grass grows
greener on the hill below the abbey.


What’s kept in a box and buried
under a child’s trundle bed, secret
Hushpuppy shoebox of treasures, becoming
the old Guillen Cigar tin of taboos, collected


matchbooks, beer tabs, Pamela Anderson beaming
in a windblown sundress, unused prophylactics:
a slapdash catalogue of Eriksonian industries, and guilt.
The best and worst things are often unforeseen.


There are those we cannot name or will not, swirling
in varied pockets of deep night or no-one-looking.


Swinging slowly in the swings beside the elementary
school we went to, she told me
what she’d do it she were pregnant, and had I heard
about the abbey on the hill? Young girls


took their unplanned blessings to the Abess’
commune to be delivered, then buried
silently among the gardens, flourishing
in emerald green, dappled with the cascade


of lavender foxgloves and bluebells
tolling omens of indifference through the valley.





--
Jim Davis is a graduate of Knox College and an MFA candidate at Northwestern University. Jim lives, writes, and paints in Chicago, where he edits North Chicago Review. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Seneca Review, Adirondack Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and Contemporary American Voices, in addition to winning multiple contests, prizes, Editor’s Choice awards, and a recent nomination for the Best of the Net Anthology. His book, Assumption (Unbound Content, 2013) will soon be followed by book two, Earthmover (Unbound Content).

In addition to the arts, Jim is a teacher, coach, and international semi-professional football player.

    Get updates from jet fuel review

Subscribe to Newsletter
© COPYRIGHT 2019. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
    • Masthead
  • Submit
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Submit Here
  • Features
  • Interviews
  • Book Reviews
  • Previous Issues
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022