BUILDING THE PLANE AS WE FLY IT
The local girl pivots,
looks the artist in the eye.
Light glistens her skin,
a luminosity.
Listen. The price of silence
has plummeted.
Language is the new crypto.
Is it artificial? Yes.
Is it intelligent? Not very.
But it is fast and dirty
like creek run in May.
4.7 billion cubic meters
of unused hand sanitizer
exist on earth – roughly
the land mass of West Africa.
Okay, I made that up.
See? Anything can be typed,
digested and digitized,
spat back at us as fact.
Raptors soar in perfect arcs
that prophesize the rapture.
I’m about to be activated.
“Sir, this is a Denny’s.”
SCRUBBING METADATA
Moon-streaked and hamstrung,
the barkless trees muscle through
the blue-black, a harbinger of
our ashes jammed into vases.
No more toothaches, no more sore feet,
insomnia no longer a stand-in for eternity,
thumbtacks in the corkboard, we lurk
beyond the clock door waiting for the cuckoo.
It has been said that grief is love with no
place to go. Sounds true. Whoop-de-do.
Eventually the grackles got into our crackers
and ate their fill. Janitors gathered
after hours out past the refinery,
then one night: the Northern Lights.
Things hadn’t turned out as planned,
but this other actual thing might do.
We just need some new nouns, some polished
up verbs, and a stronger pair of boots.
IN UNISON
Some say teeter-totter, some say see saw.
Someone’s daughter leads a murder of girls
like a flurry of birds toward the four square,
toward the free throw line, toward the urinals.
We all have an origin story
even if we can’t name the specific womb,
the hutch, the fence, the patch of dirt.
In my dream, a peach is quartered,
quartered again, the pit stabbed and chucked.
Not everything requires spelling out
or sanding down – apex predators, boat knots,
witch hazel, tax dodges, abject greed.
The night is moonless, blighted. Don’t let them
lecture you on what you already know.
*****
Edward Johnson is a civil rights lawyer who has spent the past 30 years representing people living on and over the edge of homelessness. He is currently living fulltime in a cabin in the North Cascades and working on poems, old and new. Poetry is forthcoming in Eclectica Magazine and Down in the Dirt.