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  • Jona L. Pedersen
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Jona L. Pedersen

Winner of the Thomas McGrath Award for Poetry 
Runner-up, John Little Fiction Scholarship

Guest judge Roy Guzmán said that Jona Pedersen’s poems “blew me away in the same way some of Sylvia Plath’s and Anne Sexton’s poems have. The language is relentless, the images eternal, the soul of these poems restless.”

The creative writing scholarship committee had this to say on Jona Pedersen’s fiction: “Lyrical and dream-like, Jona Pedersen’s fabulist tales lay bare the heart-deep truths about the ties that bind us to friends and lost loves alike. While much recent magical realism is content to simply re-tell familiar stories, Jona’s prose opens the old tales at their seams and stitches them to the fabric of contemporary culture, to reveal narrative truths that are both timeless yet of our moment. We look forward to reading Jona’s further explorations in that twilit space between reality and fantasy.”

matchstick keeper 

loves me, loves me not,
loves me, loves me not, loves
me, loves me – van Gogh painted her 
petals in the color of a highway
sunset. the world is ending a little
at a time, beginning in this empty
parking lot; California was meant
to burn. on fire, not on fire, on 
fire – he cut off his ear, again
and again. then he soaked the sunflower
seeds in his spilled blood. the rivers run 
hollow, but he will bleed to water the fields
yellow. he will die on this canvas, his fate
sealed by paint drier than a cactus forest.
acrylics stuck beneath his fingernails, 
he scratches the surface of national 
geographic photographs. he carried 
a thousand ghosts in his palette, somebody,
give him a band-aid for fuck’s sake. who 
would have thought that his brush could turn
red into blue and blue into the brightest color?
like light filtering through the blinds of my 
window, seeping honey in the morning when
the rooster tattooed on her skin calls on the 
scarecrow to protect van Gogh’s field of 
sunflowers. she told me it means home and
home is with her always, but I made my home
in the parking lot where the matchstick keeper
dwells. he’s driving across burnt bridges while
trumpets play on the radio, interrupted by static 
spells and chants. one hand on the steering wheel 
of his truck, a piece of bambi’s antlers hanging
from the keychain. bambi’s roadkill, bambi’s hooves
forever treading the flames, bambi’s taxidermied
head mounted above the fireplace where smoke
signals erupt from the chimney. they say, 
don’t get too close, your canvas is only coal 
here. your canvas turned to ash, your wings will
catch fire; California burns 
yellow. 

weather vane 

I staged my own death, 
hosted my own funeral 
and from the roof of the church 
the weather vane’s beak guided me 
away from the sunflower fields 
where you were born 
and into the tundra 
where your doppelgänger roamed.
I had nothing but an empty matchstick box
to ward off foul fowl. 

do you remember when I found you 
wearing a chicken onesie 
in the parking lot at 2 am, 
crying inside the car we used
to go chasing ufos at night with?
do you remember abba 
on the radio? 

                       and do you remember 
that weird thing in soledad? do you 
remember after the accident 
when you covered my skin in tar like
black honey, rolling me in feathers 
from the dead angel in 
the trunk of your car? 

(you were good with duct tape. 
I was good at holding my breath.) 

at the airport, you told me:
“don’t be a chicken,”
and pointed to your arm 
as if the rooster tattooed on your skin 
with cockfight blood instead of ink 
could set an example for who 
you thought I should be. but 
            I was the boy with the yellow bike
                       rabbit with the highest jump 
                                  a heart out of its beat. 

About Jona L. Pedersen

Jona L. Pedersen grew up on an island on Norway’s coast, but has since relocated to the US to pursue a degree in English with a minor in biology at the University of North Dakota. When they aren’t studying, they like to explore the outdoors, spend time with their two rats, and make art. In their writing, Jona aspires to capture the wonders of the natural world – creating stories which tread the line between reality and dreams.

Department of English
Merrifield Hall Room 200K
276 Centennial Dr Stop 7209
Grand Forks, ND 58202-7209
P 701.777.3321
english@UND.edu
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