John Olson

Color Noctambule (from Logo Lagoon) At night the colors crawl down off the wall with their shrill contours smeared with excitement and tell us of goldfinches and jujubes. They jabber of controversies of brick and swimming pools monastic as soup. They tell us we are blind and that they are nervous and teetering on rain. We say nothing because we are asleep. We are asleep and do not listen. Green walks around in a dark pine forest and blue says we have a friend in osmosis. A red rose gathers the lips of representation and makes a bouquet of syntax and breath. A yellow sun walks across the sky in a black robe fringed with golden beads. A pink blob imagines it is a pig and then explodes into bacon. A gray mist envelopes a hill and a tattered cloud vomits a mountain. Brown mimics the sound of heavy machinery digging the earth. A black elastic belt with a thin white stripe emerges from a theory of light reeking of desire and gunsmoke. The alarm goes off and the colors shatter into metal. Daylight bursts golden over the mountains. Everything becomes inexplicable as space; a knife on the counter, a thought in the throat. BIO: John Olson's poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including American Letters & Commentary, Antenym, B City, Caliban, Crosscut Anthology, Cross Cultural Poetics, Ergo, Exquisite Corpse, Fine Madness, First Intensity, Lingo, Mirage #4 Period(ical), New American Writing, Sulfur, Talisman, The Germ, The Raven Chronicles, Vapor Strains andVolt. He is author of three chapbooks, Swarm of Edges (poetry) from bcc press, Eggs & Mirrors (poetry & short fiction) from Wood Works Press and Logo Lagoon (prose poems) from Paper Brain Press. Echo Regime, a collection of poetry published between 1992 and 1999, is forhcoming from Black Square Press, with cover art by Seattle artist Randy Hayes. His literary criticism has appeared in the American Book Review, Rain Taxi, Sulfur, First Intensity and theStranger, a Seattle weekly. He has had two feature articles in the SeattleWeekly and his short stories have appeared in Dirigible, Etcetera, and First Intensity. He is married to the poet Roberta Olson and lives in Seattle.