Jona Colson

featured maryland writers

Jona Colson is a poet, educator, and translator, and is the author of Said Through Glass (a poetry collection). He is also the translator of Aguas/Waters by Miguel Avero and the co-editor of America’s Future: poetry and prose in response to today (2025). His poems, translations, and interviews have appeared in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, LitHub, and elsewhere. He is co-president of Washington Writers’ Publishing House and edits the bi-weekly journal, WWPH Writes. He is a professor of ESL at Montgomery College and lives in Washington, D.C. www.jonacolson.com

Ghost Crab

Ghost Crab

Ocypode quadrata I am swift-legged— skittering sand like white gold and composing labyrinthine veins that lead to my spiraling. I am night bound and will see with my black eyes in the blackness. Waves crest. I move sideways. Frantic for debris, clams, carrion. I try to satisfy my hunger, my boxed body alive, but I don’t know what to feel, and I pray for wings in silence. Is there a law that governs carapace and gilled beasts? I do my faithful work of burrowing, young enough to believe nothing. Only ghosting on grit and making a home with claws. The hardest task to live by instinct— the sea splitting, like a thief, too close.

“ This poem started as a prompt in a lyric sequence course I took with Major Jackson at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, one of the most magical places in the US. I wrote, and continue to write, persona poems from the perspective of the animal.”

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