Poems
by Edward Johnson

 

Glove Compartment

 

You can’t bullshit a cricket.

My fourth chakra is dilated

and my mind is brimming

with locally sourced mindfulness,

a cartography of hills and hollers,

dried conifers all around me,

lodge poles and ecstatic pine sap.

I crushed it at the silent retreat.

Ask any of the facilitators.

Purified by wordlessness,

my body was quiet like a foosball table,

my precise longitude unknown,

my metabolic density measured

in lost plosives and fricatives.

Purified, I ran through the foxglove

of my mind and into the parking lot

because I had Pringles in the glovebox.

 

 

 

 

The Push/Shove Conundrum

 

Who are these people in the house

next door? They seem decent enough

as we exchange pleasantries by the

mailboxes but nothing is as it appears.

Shadows stretch backward toward the sun.

Electricians arrive in unmarked vans

to check our glitchy Wi-Fi. Sea lions

bivouac like vagrant bivalves to the

moorage outside of town. Then the raids

begin. Sirens scream through the night.

People are here one day, gone the next. 

We were not as ready as we should have been.

History repeats itself. But seriously, here?

And now we have ourselves to think about.

 

 

 

 

 

Prioritizing Anxiety

 

The world is getting hotter.

I couldn’t get tempeh

on my pad see ew last night

because of this supply chain thing

or maybe the great resignation.

Truth is a skipping stone

thrown into the ceiling fan.

Every evening, I run past the tents

as my phone counts my steps.

A toad hops into the window well.

Another bird flies into the double pane glass.

The poor are loathed and villainized.

I’m not the person I’ve claimed to be. 

 

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