Jessica E. Johnson
Idaho
in response to Matthew Zapruder’s poem of the same title
All summer yes
it was on fire.
I was always
coming back there
from the B.C. coast
where people in sweaters
squinted through binoculars
at white yachts and a sea
full of imagined salmon.
Once someone
glimpsed John Wayne
in the glassy discs.
By the nineties
he was long gone and
every year was
bad fishing.
Once my brother
and I and a boy
who said he could sail
swam out to one of them
and left a few wet prints
on the deck
before having no idea
what to do next
just like later I had no idea
what to do with the smoke-pink sky
above the pitted freeway
on the descent
into Spokane. An impervious
surface, a lack of purchase
beyond the moment—
towns existing only
on a map, words like
Huetter signifying not
even a post office, unbranded
mountains we walked
and walked without thinking
of their names.
Forty-five
Is an age and a gun too big for a child
I remember from the gravel pit
A sting in the hand
Another exercise in joining men
And not showing how it feels.
To be born on a hillside
Rooted there. Light comes and leaves
A glade that no one sees.
Who is meant to bloom will bloom
And turn and fall
Close to others of her kind.
The other option is the one I know
To leave behind a dozen times
At first a place, a way of ever being used to things
And then the self. Seeking and finding
what you know is there: a way of being
Different than you are.
I live on a hillside
Far from where I’m from.
A gong chime sounds our winter nights
And every summer the city
Smells like piss and dust and the plants
Want water we are trying
To save. I’ve lost
My looks: a stranger’s face to look to.
People greet me now like I know something
They don’t, like I’ve thought of everything
And probably I have, the way you have to
When you’ve had a ways to go. I keep buying
Ceramic bowls: bright shapes
Thrown from an idea, molded by hands
Fired hard and stacked in families.
Each one’s supposed to exist
Whole until it breaks.
Burke Canyon
Photo of snow crystalling
the tiny town where I grew up
like it formed there
instead of falling.
Mountainside rising
behind an antique street
hosts snowlight, snowshadow
a snowglobe scene.
I remember on that street
people going about their
business while a
terrier, hit and yelping
dragged its dead back legs
off the ice
and the raised moon
on my classmate’s arm
where she said her older brother
shot her. B.B. gun, I asked?
No, twenty-two.
This is where we’re spending Christmas
captions the woman
who was a girl
who was my friend
when we both lived there.
I loved her face.
Any time there was a race she beat
the boys, chest sprung wide,
head held high in
a sprinter’s stance, like her body
was made to do it.
She lives in California now
and all I know about her life
is her likeness echoing in
pictures of her kids.
Past the photo
the crystal mountain
opens up a crack.
Alone, I used to run into the canyon
just to know I could
reach another place—
rock walls fortress-steep, a row of chain-link,
houses with the curtains drawn
like they formed there. Last night,
the baby breathing
on my bones, his tiny ear against my cheek,
humming him to sleep
in the cascading dark,
how is it that I disappeared again
into a quiet blue
into the sound of blood?
A cry would break the world.
Jessica E. Johnson writes poetry, nonfiction, and things in between. She's the author of the book-length poem Metabolics (Acre Poetry Series), the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (New Michigan Press), and the memoir Mettlework (Acre Books). Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Annulet Poetics, Sixth Finch, and Off Assignment, among others. She teaches around Portland, Oregon and co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series.
Artwork: “title” by Daniel Lurie
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