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Orange Tree, from Uncommon Prayer; Poems, by Kimberly Johnson

#Kimberly Johnson #uncommon prayer #poetry #words #this poem is so fucking beautiful I read it days ago and I am STILL thinking about it #the alliteration is delicious

A poem by Kimberly Johnson

Foley Catheter

I clean its latex length three times a day With kindliest touch, Swipe an alcohol swatch

From the tender skin at the tip of him Down the lumen To the drainage bag I change

Each day and flush with vinegar. When I vowed for worse Unwitting did I wed this

Something-other-than-a-husband, jumble Of exposed plumbing And euphemism. Fumble

I through my nurse’s functions, upended From the spare bed By his every midnight sound.

Unsought inside our grand romantic Intimacy Another intimacy

Opens—ruthless and indecent, consuming All our hiddenmosts. In a body, immodest

Such hunger we sometimes call tumor; In a marriage It’s cherish. From the Latin for cost.

Kimberly Johnson

Kimberly Johnson writes: This poem arose out of the experience of caring for my spouse as he underwent prolonged treatment for cancer.

More poems by Kimberly Johnson are available through her website.

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Voluptuary

Sevenmile Creek in the extravagance

of June, a fullness of flowers: paintbrush

and larkspur, beeflower and attendant bees,

the cedars sough, the sunfired pines

forge filigree at the timberline.

My ballerina sister on the riverbank

poses, rod cocked to rearward,

released, and retracted, line tripped

terpsichorean by the weight of the fly.

Her flybox cockeyed reveals homemade

damsels: the Emerging Sparkle, the Orange

Sunrise, the Dark Scintillator, and a Green

Butt Skunk. A ridiculous scene, tableau pastc

liché, with verdure and soughing

and blah blah blah. She hooks a splake,

flips him to shore, yanks her knife open,

swipes anus to jaw. With a finger inside

she slides guts, gore, and shit in a shining

red pile. She dunks him, lets the stream

clean the gash, chucks him to me

for the icebucket, and here the suckerpunch

of beauty: white vault of ribs in their arch

to the spine, one red vein bulging faithfully

skull to tail, red gills fragile, useless

beneath the operculum, ordered

like layers of vellum. Scales flake off

and stick to my hand like glitter. Like silver.

-Kimberly Johnson

#Kimberly Johnson #poet #poetry #lit #fish #nature

Feral

That year the world handbasketed to hell, To bind our busted Loves to something guileless and frail

We brought a rabbit home. We bought the cage, The sweetest timothy, The pellets and the pine. We rearranged

The house to make him room. We couldn't wait To rest his softness In our laps, to feel him soften

To our touch, to touch the tender of his head All undefended. But he flinched from every gentle,

Every gesture in his presence, trembled When we tendrilled Green shoots to his feeding,

Hunched for cover at our coming. Every evening's New endeavor To lure him into his enclosure

He fled, and ended hackled in a corner Heartbeating Like we were predators.

The more he ran, the more we had to chase. Anon, apace, We each fulfilled the other's fears.

Kimberly Johnson

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Locker-room truant in a locked stall Through study hall Hiding, hand-stifling her cries, A girl wide-eyes the unimagined smear Of blood rusting Her fingertips. Secret, quaint horror. Some betrayal of the flesh has left her Vulnerable, Her blithe pellmell Redefining to this singularity. But no. She is smarter Than her body. She will starve This woman out, she will run and outrun The turncoat moon. She will firesale down To a shoestring inventory: item: Two eyes, indifferent Blue; item: brain and brainstem; Item: one mouth, tightened like a screwcap On the business end Of the pipebomb she’s just become.

Kimberly Johnson / Female

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“I was trying, I think, to get inside the idea of desire, of what longing is, and for some reason I felt that inanimate objects were a good set of instruments to use to think about that idea. That move allowed me, a little, to separate myself from the question. I know what I desire, what I long for, but I was more interested in thinking about the urgency of longing toward something absent. And since the preeminent term for absence in western culture is God, these strange attempts to inhabit other kinds of desire took the form of prayers.”

— Kimberly Johnson

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