swifts & s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings
flashes of memory
Jason Montgomery
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Wood
You race far ahead through the cleared woods
Carried by the branches of your youth
Speeding to your potential
Over fallen pine needles
And the ripe acorns
I stop to gather
As tokens
Of our
time.
Dead Places
Love the world’s silent, dying places.
Old buildings, dry creek beds, salt flats,
And other moved-on places
Will hold space for when you
Stumble upon them
At moments when
most needed
but not
sought.
Acorns
Oak
Acorns
With cracked shells
Littered across
A borrowed nightstand
Are simple mementos.
They are quiet reminders.
Brown, red, golden tiny totems
Of our countless vanished ancestors
Peace Interrupts
Not every moment is a horror.
Sometimes joy floats on a puddle
moving like street oil rainbows
after a brief warm rain.
Peace can interrupt
euphoria
long enough
to stop
doubt.
Nonets
Someone asked me why I write nonets.
I wish I could have explained that
they are how I see the world.
flashes of memory
fleeting clarity
drifting away
bit by bit
Until
Gone.
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These nonets are among other poems in Jason Montgomery’s
These Latest Apocalypes now out from Arteidolia Press.
Jason R. Montgomery, or JRM, is a Chicano/Indigenous Californian writer, painter, community artist and engagement artist from El Centro, California. In 2016, along with Poet Alexandra Woolner, and illustrator Jen Wagner, JRM founded Attack Bear Press in Easthampton, MA. Jason’s work engages the cross-section of Chicano/Indigenous identity, cultural hybridization, post-colonial reconstruction, and political agency. His writing and visual art bridges the aesthetics and feel from the early cubist collage movement and the Russian abstract movement of the 1920s with living and historical Native/Indigenous Californian and Chicano art traditions to explore the Post-colonial narrative through active synthesis and guided (re)construction. JRM’s work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Storm Cellar, Ilanot Review, Rust and Moth and other publications. Jason is one of 2021 Newell Flather Awards for Leadership in Public Art outstanding nominees and 2021-2023 Easthampton Poets Laureate. Jason is also the co-founder of the police abolition group “A Knee is Not Enough” (AKINE) in Easthampton, MA.
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