"All the fucks I give (are so, so many)", "Cavities", "Cry 'Girl'", "Going to be Don Quixote in the end" & "Your damn little red roadster: glimpses of a relationship in haiku" By Maia Brown-Jackson

All the fucks I give (are so, so many)

“Look at me,” people say,

gesturing empty arms to open air.

“Look at all the fucks I give.”

Implying, of course,

that the air around them is devoid of fucks;

that they give zero.

“Look at me,” I say in response.

“Look at all the fucks I give.

Look at them.”

Because they are shining bright enough to blind

like radioactive waste in a children’s cartoon

because I don’t give zero.

I don’t know how.

I started a pile of fucks very, very young

and it tilted over

and spilled into the Mariana Trench

and still I added until I started worrying about rising sea levels

and stopped with that one.

Then I started haphazardly flinging fucks into the night sky

until it got too bright for it to still be night

and I had to stop doing that, too.

So now I cradle my fucks between my palms,

my stack growing ever taller.

My mother asks when I’ll put them down.

I need my hands, she tells me.

I need to be able to defend myself;

I’ve become an open target,

just clutching my fucks to my chest so they don’t fall

and I can’t see over this ever-growing pile any more

and I’m already clumsy

and soon I’ll have no choice but to fall

(but I don’t let her know that).

And I can't answer her,

because I don't know how to put them down.

No.

Instead, I always manage to balance just one more on top

like the world’s most desperate game of jenga

and then one more thing happens

and you can bet I’ll give a fuck about that, too,

and my god it’s exhausting—

Hope is so fucking exhausting.

But what’s the alternative?

Because I have too much unfinished to be an epilogue yet.

Maybe I’m an ellipsis, an em dash, a semicolon—

something that says this sentence isn’t over.

And maybe I am more vulnerable,

less prepared to protect myself,

a few more wounds than most from years of fighting battles I could have ignored,

but that same stubborn nature that won’t let that piece of me,

deep inside, stop believing in good,

that’s a virtue, too, because I am not admitting defeat.

Even if I trip and fall again

and again

and again.

Even though there are no guarantees.

Even if my only shield against yet another

fractured bone from clumsy feet

and an obstructed view is fragile defiance.

I still give all the fucks.

And arduous and painful as it is,

I think I prefer it to the alternative.

So, to all of you out there,

all of you who spread arms

you don’t realize are begging for something to carry

if only to soothe a soul too defeated to weep over the fear

that it’s grown empty and it doesn’t know what it’s meant to do anymore,

then go ahead:

Look at all the fucks I give. Take one of mine.

Cavities

Published by Dipity Lit Mag, 2024

Just take a minute to be grateful

if this morning when you rose,

groggy and disoriented, perhaps,

you didn’t need glass

or silicon hydrogel polymers

to see your face unblurred in the mirror.

The cosmos and cesium,

the nebulae and nitric acid—

yes,

they will kill you,

and yes,

you have no say,

and yes,

yes,

yes, you are an overripe wound

suffocating under the heel of the

overlarge capitalist mosquito

who sucks and sucks and sucks and

never bleeds you dry but leaves

that annoyance, that prick, that itch—

and yes,

that is your fate if

you believe in fate,

and that is your destiny

if you believe in destiny,

but also: fuck fate.

Fuck destiny.

Try to hold, for just a moment,

the gratitude that this morning when you woke

the same cortisol that runs through

your veins poisoning you with epigenetic trauma

inherited from the ancestors hunted and slaughtered

also gave you, perhaps, the genetics to

eat leftover cake for breakfast without

worrying too much about cavities.

Or brush well and eat the cake, anyway.

It's time to get used to saying, “Fuck you,”

and doing exactly as you please.

Cry “Girl”

Includes excerpt of “Holy II,” published in BlazeVOX Journal, 2023

I tire of being human:

I wish to be holy.

My hands, bless not bruise—

my mouth, sing not sin—

my heart, unbroken with purpose.

It doesn’t make much difference,

though.

My time is limited here,

and no matter if I bruise

or bless,

you still spit girl at me

like it’s a foul word.

I wish I were a shapeshifter.

In my dreams, I am

wolf,

lion,

beast.

In my dreams,

I am born free and

unburdened,

and no one will deign

to underestimate my power,

and pretty will be the

least important thing about me.

In my dreams,

I shine gold

and blind you with goodness.

All my mistakes

are turned to art,

and I race to the cliff’s edge,

and hurl myself, unselfconscious, at the stars.

In my dreams,

girl will be my battlecry,

and you will cower when I call.

Going to be Don Quixote in the end

On that day that I was slammed into a landlocked shipwreck

and there was someone crowing on the prow—

well, I didn’t care if it was my dying hallucination

and didn’t hesitate before I took their hand,

restless and ready for a bad idea:

they changed everything.

I knew my destiny I always had and

the sky was such a plain blue that

I was already mentally preparing for disaster,

so I canonized myself patron saint of tilting at windmills

because I’m going to be Don Quixote in the end, anyway.

They touch me like the end is coming, and fast,

with their hands rough, with their hands soft, with their hands—

and their voice rasps like spilled ashtrays

with still-burning cigarette butts

as they read my body like braille,

my too-pale skin the canvas for their fingerpaint.

They are an enigma, promising me with a wicked laugh

that we will find the cosmic significance of it all,

then they crash me like a flickering neon orange sign

(VACANCY; NO VACANCY;

VACANCY; NO VACANCY)

into heartbreak—

before repenting on their knees and

begging forgiveness between my legs.

I'm so absolutely mad over them,

but I start to fear waking from these opium dreams,

crushed by gravity—

start to wonder if I had gone too far this time—

and our atoms are flickering now

and I’m worried this may be the time their wings finally melt

and then they tell me to

hold on

and

crash!

slam!

We break into 1605

and now we’re crossing swords with windmills

until they turn to giants and—

suddenly—

I’m—

!—

Your damn little red roadster: glimpses of a relationship in haiku

I LOVE YOU. You love

me. ​​ Yet neither of us ​ are

very good at This.

I don’t know if You

And Me could ever be a 

We, but I do know 

that something about

your little red roadster and

all those iced coffees 

you buy me makes the 

FOOLISH, NAÏVE, part of my 

brain absurdly Hope—

Somehow   you can make

me believe I'm loved as much

as a Saint's Last Prayer.

We’re drinking champagne

and whiskey on your roof and

we know We’re In Love.

Your arm is around 

my shoulders and We Never 

DEFINE WHAT WE ARE.

Chasing toads, skipping

stones;  m y   skin ghost-pale on   y o u r s

as          you catch                          my hand.

We act as If We’re

Holy, though we just ROT to

plant food in the end.

I'm a Hurricane

Manifested and I'll wreck

you; still, please, kiss me—

So I just   b e g   you

to BRUISE ME LIKE DYNAMITE,

force me to combust.

Your grin (Dark, Hungry)

emerges as I   d r a g   b a r e

f e e t   across hardwood.

I slide my heel down

the column of your spine,   and

count the vertebrae

while your TEETH and TONGUE 

Write An Indigo Sonnet

on my carotid.

I let myself be

The   I c a r u s   to your s u n

for the Chance To Fly.

To meet Apollo,

I risked it all and got too 

close but Still: I FLEW.

I WISH we could live

happily ever onward,

but that's not Our Fate:

our stolen time is

not enough; but we pretend 

for just One More Day.

Always ONE MORE DAY.

Just One More. We're not ready.

Please  don't   rouse   us   yet.

Maia Brown-Jackson is a Pushcart-nominated, award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Across the Margin, Anti-Heroin Chic, Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, La Piccioletta Barca, Maudlin House, Prime Number Magazine, and others. Her debut poetry collection, And My Blood Sang, was published by Tim Saunders Publications in 2023. Her second collection, Gifted, opens for pre-orders this autumn with Nymeria Publishing. In her spare time, she volunteers with a Yazidi NGO, accidentally starts learning quantum physics when she looks up the qualities of neutrinos for a random poem, and wastes time with the world’s sweetest, clumsiest cat.