Douglas S. Jones teaches at Western Colorado University. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in The Pinch, Blackbird, Barrow Street, and have been featured in American Life in Poetry.
They say the blue spinal fluid of the horseshoe crab could holdthe cure for cancer. Imagine them, their spike tails strapped skyward, leaking not the ocean but its color. . .With the flatness of the ocean floor, this relative of the spider — this non web-spinning cousin—doesn’t know how to be inverted. Or bled. Exoskeletoned and the one eye reading… Read more →
Outside the summer-dead cemetery, a crew chips the trimmed branches of pine. Some morningsit’s the fragrance of a cut lawn that make you breathe deeper. Others, the lawnmower’s two-stroke fumes. Today, despite the noise, you could think forest and be in deep shade, sap formingon cones overhead. The soft earth of needles seem to never decay but weave like a… Read more →
All the training for the uncanny could not have prepared us for this. Sure, we that invented theelectric chair in search of the humane. The repeating rifle. We used disease to clear land so ourchildren may inherit the earth without one thought of the meek. We, after all, dropped TheBomb. Twice. So can we be surprised that righteous blood from… Read more →
Tadarida brasiliensis You could almost be forgiven for thinkingThey were bats, the apples hanging winter- Black in their branches: almost forgiven for thinkingThem sacks fattened on insects plucked from a sky sucked dry of light. Suspended inversely in slow snow, they bulgeThe squeak of seeds, of leaves springing Up from harvest rot. What sugarThe sun brings out, what discordant music,… Read more →