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| Altar of Melancholy
This is not spiritual pilgrimage or dive into restraint, the recluse in dark, baggy clothes, hair shorn, head bent low over Birkenstocked feet. This is doubling back into a wide blank field where air turns the color of water rusted in aged pipes, whispers its insatiable need to rekindle fire into angry blue sticks. I am haunted by the cadence of desire: stolen blackberries dropped into chilled wine, rolled between my teeth, the end-crust of expensive bread. Tonight even the moon reflects another’s light, its desire for a fleshed-out image, round instead of halved, as real as my need for absolution. This is not spiritual pilgrimage, but the child gone adult, fingers purpled with stolen fruit, mouth stuffed with wine-soaked bread, with more than illusion to lay on the altar. Three Forms of Indecision I have become a tri-fold a paper accordion: one moment an obstinate crow with voice, eggs just hardening in promise the next a slight dancer without fear of my partner letting go—then a crow again—comes the musky scent of winter clumps of sodden leaves; I become the changeling a third thing not even I expected: the mare ready to throw her rider. underwater origami it began with a drowning her going under his following an old devotion like folded handkerchiefs or origami birds fashioned from scratch paper metal being hammered into the shape of luck luck being hammered into fire theirs was not the dance of opposites stepping on left and right footprints red and blue patterns laid out by teachers they could not trust it was more catching the wave on its crest and following it to shore breathless unsure when their thought became too large for either of them to carry they buried it in desert sand half-way between snow and coastal fog they asked what it meant when ice plants appeared in ridges of waxy purple questioned each other without words at last they bent to the gods begged to know how two can discretely begin a necklace of cranes open their eyes at the same moment the necklace intricately linked and them breathing evenly underwater |
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| Colette Jonopulos |
| Colette Jonopulos lives, writes, and edits in a small yellow house in Eugene, Oregon. Her poetry has appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, cho, HeartLodge, Big Pulp, Admit Two, and Yellow Mama. Rattlesnake Press published her chapbook, The Burden of Wings, in 2005. She currently co-edits and publishes Tiger’s Eye: A Journal of Poetry. Poetry has become her work, as well as her obsession. http://www.rattlesnakepress.com/Colette_Jonopulos.html |
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