Jacob J Billingsley

A Sober Spell

If this beer is a glass of earwax, my body
is made, then, after all, as the poems say,
from the earth. When the bad moonshine
took the light from your eyes because you
were looking at it, your body showed you
again how and where you should retch it.

If this beer was a glass of yellow string, my
enthusiasm would go on unending like, oh,
Weezer’s dead sweater or a magic-scarf shirt,
like tendons not taxed by reverie and rack, full
in becoming the inner ear where a squeaky
cart could wheel me past you without end.

A painter doesn’t have to eat the paints
to be sickened by moonlight. Dizzied pleasure
stalks us all. We careen through the night
in a double pursuit. We climb into its mouth
and suckle its tooth. When the whitedog nubs
you with its snout, don’t think. Just you run.

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Jacob J Billingsley lives and works outside St. Louis with his partner and a cat. He holds a B.A. in English with an emphasis in creative writing from the University of Missouri. You can find previous work in Viridian Door, ANMLY, Empty Room Radio, EcoTheo Review and Alocasia. His poem, “The Felled,” was featured on Verse Daily in May 2025.