Welcome to National Poetry Month, 2016! We’re celebrating all month long. Each day we will bring you a poem we love–a selection from one of our published or forthcoming collections.
Today’s featured poet is Scott Alexander Jones, author of elsewhere.
Where we climb sequoias toward the stratosphere
robotically pursued by
turquoise reincarnations
of Toulouse-Lautrec—
Crocodiles dyspeptic with arboreal claws, eyes
alchemized from phosphorus—
They are gaining on us—
The delirium tremens of this varicose
redwood quaking like playing chicken full lotus on
corroded train tracks—
And we somehow consolidate
all trepidation
toward one another—
The way this world isn/t the way we thought it would become.
As one hermetic satellite
pulsing emerald
glides windlessly beneath us
guided by the only force I/m comfortable calling:
god—
Nocturnes of wind
& the stems of crow-
berry, halcyon in your terracotta
locks of hair, the syncopation of our breathing
growing less labored the longer we await
being eaten alive—
______________________________
Scott Alexander Jones is the author of elsewhere (Black Lawrence Press, 2014), Carpe Demons (Unsolicited Press, 2014), and One Day There Will Be Nothing to Show That We Were Ever Here (Bedouin Books, 2009), and co-founder of the punk literary zine Zerø Ducats. Having lived in Portland, OR; Wellington, NZ; and Prague, CZ, he currently calls Bozeman, MT, home. A Mandarin version of elsewhere and other poems, translated by the Chinese poet Peter Feng, will be released in May 2016 by Showwe, a press in Taiwan.