swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

the wind off the playa
Jason Montgomery

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Salton Sea
A staggering billboard welcomes visitors to Bombay Beach.

Evaporated salt.
Dead fish.
toxic wind.

This whole place is a broken hand mirror
Turned into an inland lake
Casting back an image of myself.

I am too numb to see.

My decisions are as toxic as the wind off the playa.

A Letter to Jade re: Our childhoods

Dear Son,
I want to give you the feeling of being eight,
And sitting in clean pajamas,
In my grandma’s back room with the small TV
After coming back from swimming in my Tia’s pool
On the hottest day of the desert summer.

I want to show you how my skin
Golden brown, and dripping wet,
Is protection against the high desert sun
And the griddle hot black top,
As my brothers, sisters, and cousins
Make the one block walk back to grandma’s
Jumping from tree shadow to tree shadow
Then onto the neighbor’s dying grass.

I want you to feel the cold relief
of the central air that is a necessity not a luxury,
Which is such a welcome counterpoint
To the hot dry air outside,
But never so much so that I would sacrifice one forever for the other.

I want you to smell
mingled of dust, heat, starch,
chlorine, and clean
That was my boyhood.

I need you to forgive me robbing you of yours
as I chased the pale chemical substitute of all of these feelings
For all those years.

That need might be the worst part of me.
The asking for forgiveness
Knowing you now look for all these things I had
But failed to give to you.

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Jason R. Montgomery, or JRM, is a Chicano of Indigenous Californian/Mexican descent 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 Transborder Indigenous 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, Cosmonauts Avenue 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. They are also the founder of the annual Holyoke Community Ofrenda, the police transformation group A Knee is Not Enough (AKINE), and various public engagement projects.  Attack Bear Press →