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There’s the casual distance winter’s kept.
Say it’s the same as dawn’s attempt
to keep night from day—those slowing moments
between blackened violet and redband pink,
where my fishing line lands on day,
but not yet day.Jerry Brunoe was raised on the Warm Springs Reservation. He attended Oregon State University (OSU) briefly and sporadically. He left OSU and his journey was broad but always within reach of a good book. His poems have appeared, or will appear, in Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Quarterly, Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, Oregon Poetic Voices, Naugatuck River Review, Basalt, Horizon Review, Contrary, and To Topos: Poetry International. As the Poetry Editor of Prism, OSU’s Student Art & Literary Magazine, he published many of Toe Goods’ first poems. He is a Toe Good One Guy, Enit? The rough translation of this cultural slang can be summed up by Emily Dickinson: “I’m nobody—who are you?” He is a Co-Founder and Co-Editor of Toe Good Poetry.
He has a book-length manuscript, “Smaller Nouns.” It is comprised largely of his Love Poem Series. This project consists of imitations, epigraphs, and epistles. He has mastered his personal verse, pantoums, villanelles, and haikus. He dabbles in ghazals and tinkers with sestinas. Among strong parallels, alliteration, and the use of repetition he developed a sense for prosody—the continued negotiation between the internal and external breaths.