Jona Colson
Jona Colson’s poetry collection, “Said Through Glass,” won the 2018 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. He is also the co-editor of “This Is What America Looks Like: Poetry and Fiction from D.C., Maryland, and Virginia” (2021). His poems have appeared in “Ploughshares,” “The Southern Review,” “The Massachusetts Review” and elsewhere. His translations and interviews can be found in “Prairie Schooner,” “Tupelo Quarterly” and “The Writer’s Chronicle.”
Colason has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Colson is a professor of ESL at Montgomery College in Maryland and has lived in Washington for 20 years. In 2022, he became co-president with Caroline Bock of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House and edits the biweekly journal “WWPH Writes.”
This is one of his odes. Regarding the odes, he notes that while not exactly a sequence, “I love the idea of writing them and stringing them into my working manuscripts. They act like signposts along the way.”
Ode to Champagne
I’m in love with you.
You are glint and first blush ‒
all moon and astral-glow.
I look for you everywhere.
Inside kitchen cupboards,
under sinks, even beside nightstands.
You are the bell’s peal.
The minute past the hour
of lead. And when peril coils beneath
your bottle, the raucous light
inside burns and loosens
twilight into the dark.
Your shears cut the blossom
before the flies gather,
and I push upward into the sky
where I can see even the dead stars.
Southwest resident Sandra Beasley has written four poetry collections. If you live in DC and are interested in being featured, reach her at [email protected] for questions and submissions (one to five poems).
