DB Jonas is the author of two poetry collections: Tarantula Season and Other Poems (2023) and Flight Risk (2025). His third collection, In Dubious Terrain, is forthcoming. Known for his evocative and thought-provoking verse, Jonas explores themes ranging from personal displacement to the intricacies of the natural world. His work reflects a deep engagement with language and form, often blending the lyrical with the introspective. In addition to his published collections, more of his poetry can be found online at jonaspoetry.com.

Animations

Turns out we’re all

the likely product

of some transient

in the prebiotic 

saline soup

of early earth

the vicinity of 

a proton gradient

somewhere in

 

the neighborhood

of Godwanaland

perhaps perhaps

some puny piezo-

electric effect 

enough to spark

an onset of com- 

plexity without 

the need for any

 

flashy lightning 

strikes no cause 

beside an instance 

of the impossible 

beside what’s 

simply neighboring

no mighty agency

nor primal urgency

besides adjacency.

Urgent Message to K2-18b                                  

If we confirm that there is life on K2-18b, 

it should basically confirm that life 

is very common in the galaxy.

BBC News

 

We’ve been busy pumping

dimethyl sulfide out

in frantic quantities

for centuries now, millennia

in fact, eons even, hoping 

for a miracle, hoping someone 

might happen on these 

fleeting signs of life, these 

signals of distress, hoping

this semaphoric chemistry 

of ours might just perhaps

flag down some remote

awareness in the dark,  

some compassionate survivor 

of the need to live forever, 

as she/he/they/it passes 

through the neighborhood, 

the robust product of diversity,

a post-capitalist creation,

I envision, emancipated 

from our planetary plagues 

of nationality, religion, profit 

and disease, some lanky,

affable life-form possessed

of a life-expectancy just long 

enough to make it here 

(and back?), some sturdy 

creature fit to make its way 

across those light-years 

to this place, whose ancestors

had somehow managed 

to outlive the folly 

of their species, the madness

of their race, and who might 

speak to us of other worlds

out there like this, of what 

endures, the jeweled nights, 

the ozone sweetness

of their atmospheres.

 

Their Fierce Phonetics

At the edge of the alphabet there is no

safeguard against the dead.

Janet Frame, The Edge of the Alphabet

 

All the sounds, to them, took place as shapes,

the sounds that formed in the mouths of others,

in the silent speech of written words, the noisy

street, the gurgling ditch, the whir and murmur

of a million fans and motors, daylight’s drone, 

the peeps and squeaks of bosomy, cradling night.

 

But it was spoken words, their specific gravities,

light as pumice, heavy as basalt, the way they

cleared a place and filled it in the mouth, the shape

they made along the haptic tongue, their anxious 

rasp against the teeth, their surface planes, their

edges cool, abrasive, jagged, ridged, their awkward 

weights and densities, the gutterals that gathered 

in the air and clustered in the throat.

 

So it had been so easy for them, for us, to locate

words once heard, impossible to mislay the shapes 

that filled the ear, the eye, the cradling palate,

once their curious weight had settled in, once

they had arrived, occurred like gifts, our myriad losses 

left to bloom like crystals in the dripping dark, 

the peculiar elegance of their mouth-feel, tumbled

or toothed, the curious eloquence of half-lives living

in the lives they’d led, the stones that gathered 

in the chambers of the unremembered past, 

those long-forgotten voices of the dead.

 

Ubi sunt?

 

Where have all the readers

of Lautréamont gone off to,

who snatched a slice of Rimbaud

with their soup, a hefty hank

of Hopkins at the beach,

a dram of Ungaretti, Char,

of Kleist, Michaux, Cendrars,

Villon, or maybe even Valéry

or Yeats, Tsvetaeva or Dickinson

sometimes, to bed with them,

that such as these might 

ease their minds to sleep?

 

How is it that the frosty parlance

of our narcissistic plainspeak,

the sounding brass of anecdote,

the homely unassuming homiletics 

of a diffident sincerity, has muscled

onto center-stage? How is it that 

we’d just as soon learn something 

new about the world from a quick

perusal of the Classifieds,

or on the crosswords page?

 

And when exactly was it,

by the way, I cannot quite recall,

that melody removed its clothes?

Exactly when did poetry decide

to dress itself as prose?

 

Closer

 

I am what’s closer

to you than light

closer than air

 

closer still to you

than thought

infinitely closer

 

than what’s here

than endless night

or crowding day

 

than what’s 

in reach or right

beneath your grasp

 

closer even 

than this you 

that it approaches

 

than that you 

who awaits

than the endless

 

patience it creates 

in you in its coming 

ever closer.