It is more than a box. Tortoiseshell top, brown velvet-lined, an ornamental crustacean passed down. She who turned me said it would remind me of her. It doesn’t. I think past her, before her, to the workmanship, the small European initials of the craftsman, the slim silver legs. I’ve kept it empty until my love gave me a talisman for protection: a fragile ring of white gold. At its center, an emerald. Small cuts create broken light when I hold it to the lamp. In daylight, what would it be? Would it refract the spirit of she who wore it, her energy now trapped in the metal, her lifeblood pulling me inevitably downward? She is crafty, this woman with green eyes. I cannot look upon the ring without seeing her translucent skin, the sheaf of hair dyed red, of course, again, her eyes. I have not opened the box for three hours; perhaps I am healed of her.

Cutting Through the Woods

Colette Jonopulos

Bears, those broad-backed animals with claws the length of my palm. None of us wanted to kill them for sport, but hunger makes you do disappointing things. Like the time we were flashing across London, six of us in tandem, and a flock of geese landed at our feet. This though, was extreme thirst: days without feeding, some of us wild with desire. (Although readers of novels will not believe me, we do not take randomly from the populace.) And being so far from a city, and so long without sustenance, the bears seemed viable in ways we had not imagined. To drink of another species, their fur repugnant, was to gag frequently, even on the idea of them. Then the slow burn of new blood, an undercurrent of life widening out in arcs of pleasure, until BEAR careened through us. It is night now, the city has become a wild place of beauty, thousands of cold stars so near to the ground; the animals bedded down quietly in the mountains, and unaware.

Colette Jonopulos lives, writes, and edits in Eugene, OR, where Bob Marley and dreads are still popular. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, cho, PMS, HeartLodge, among others. She currently co-edits and publishes Tiger’s Eye: A Journal of Poetry.