Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem, every Thursday.
 

Colorado

 

Blushing water, varicose current

Glenwood Canyon, Rio Colorado

far from its red-faced consequence

in the Gulf of California, far from

humiliations in the salty flat scar of

Sonora and Baja, far from the sun

burnt indio and crimson Spaniard,

but closer to the heart, trout-tinted

and mosquito-infested artery, the

roaring rumor red through geological

adolescence of gulches, picking up

what blood it may to devil-may-care.

 

Colorado means Red, she said, like

standing on your head, like being

laughed at or choking. Really, we have

only a few colors: red for go, and black

for stop. Rojo y negro. And as the black

mosquitoes kept me awake beside the

black river all night I couldn’t make out

the stars nor the feathered serpent

waiting to digest the blood larvae down

in Yuma, Arizona. Colorado means Red.

 

Like you have some color, like a face

has some color inside, like you’re young

or drunk or standing on your head. Or

over-sexed. Or bled out. If we are bled

out we are petrified, hard of heart. So

we listen to the colored voice in the

wilderness pass by to be replaced by

voice again. We listen, and we feel like

stone. And the mosquitos bleed us out.

 

And we are black in the night with

everything else, so in the morning the

river can feed the passions of the

continent – geographies of sheepish

virgin blooms and cascading stigmatas.

 

Jeremy Ray Jewell hails from Jacksonville, FL. He has an MA in history of ideas from Birkbeck College, University of London, and a BA in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts Boston. His website is www.jeremyrayjewell.com.

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Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx