Featured OPA Contest Winner: Jerri Elliott Otto

Embracive Night

Embracive night whole the moon the uncut
melon of it the dreamsicle orange sweetness
and white coolness even as it melts itself
across the lawn yet remains entire and
wholeness of body complete and sound as it
is in youth and diminished but also whole in
fullness of age complete as it remains leaving
us grateful for the concept that stars do
circulate in light though invisible to us except
in darkness orbiting their lightness in
timelessness of space the whole sun-to-sun
day while lives are lived below in hours or a
year or within the century no matter how and
within the pages of books in the hard-bound
opus short novella or the quickest fiction in a
shrug or a look whole within the moment
where the cracked plate is still the truth the
whole broken story we’ll never know the all
of the total life the whole number undivided
the everything as it engulfs us as the fog as
an ocean or as the flames believed or not and
this is not the half of it there are two sides at
least or more to the story to the coin the
moon the yang as well as yin that figure-
ground perception of what’s left the better
half what is gone yet the whole of the
remainder remains and then begins the
unending again wholly changed.

 

WebPhoto2015Jerri Elliott Otto is a writer and free-lance editor who lives at the edge of the forest outside Corvallis, Oregon. She has been a presenter and guest teacher for classes and writing workshops, including for the Northwest Poets’ Concord. She writes regularly with several long-running writing groups based in Portland and Corvallis. Her poems have been published most recently in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Verseweavers, as well as in two hand-crafted chapbooks, Strange Country and What’s Inside. Currently, she is completing a narrative biography of her sister, the spiritual teacher, Jacqueline Metheany.

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