#roxane beth johnson

[existential-celestial]

Today I am going to try not knowing, learn little and get nothing out of it. Pliant and afloat as a waterlily, I’ll cradle my cup of water and sip it like wine, knowing good and well the taste of it is plain as glass, as a sucked-clean dime. I’ll try not thinking of God and wonder why he keeps me in the dark though I beg and beg for help, my prayers sharp as skeins of red vinegar on my tongue.

Lord, the trees can let go of every leaf when the air tells them: Now.

Tonight, I am going to water my ball of mud and try not to touch and touch the tender blades of grass shooting up like the thorn, the thorn in my side.

Roxane Beth Johnson, “Silence Is Sufficient Grace,” featured in Image (Issue 102)

[lunchboxpoems]

BLUES FOR ALMOST FORGOTTEN MUSIC

I am trying to remember the lyrics of old songs                                                                   I’ve forgotten, mostly I am trying to remember one-hit wonders, hymns,                                              and musicals like West Side Story. Singing over and over what I can recall, I hum remnants on                                                                     buses and in the car.

I am so often alone these days with echoes of these old songs                                                              and my ghosted lovers. I am so often alone that I can almost hear it, can almost feel                                                            the half-touch of others, can almost taste the licked clean spine of the melody I’ve lost.

I remember the records rubbed with static and the needle                                                                        gathering dust. I remember the taste of a mouth so sudden and still cold from                                                                                 wintry gusts. It seemed incredible then — a favorite song, a love found.                                                                       It wasn't, after all.

Days later, while vacuuming, the lyrics come without thinking. Days later, I think I see my old lover in a café but don’t,                                                                                how pleasing it was to think it was him, to finally sing that song.

This is the way of all amplitude: we need the brightness                                                                                  to die some. This is the way of love and music: it plays like a god and                                                                                  then is done. Do I feel better remembering, knowing for certain                                                                                  what’s gone?

ROXANE BETH JOHNSON

[friolenta]

Grandma is washing me white. I am the color of hot sand in the bleached sea light. I am a stain on the porcelain, persistent as tea. Stay in the shade. Don’t say she was the only one. Cousins opposite say: you too white. I am a night-blooming flower being pried open in the morning. My skin a curtain for a cage of bones, a blackbird coop. My heart is crusty bread, hardening. Hardening. This way, I feed my own fluttering. Under shade, the day looks like evening and I cannot bear the darkness. Don’t say, I can’t stand to be touched. Say, I stare into the sun to burn off the soiled hands that print my body with bloody ink. Don’t say, Mulatto. Say, I am the horse in Oz turning different colors, each prance brightening flesh. A curiosity. Don’t say, Bathwater spiraled down into the pipes. Say, I never did fade. Say, Skin holds the perseverance of my days. Folding, folding, the water continuously gathers, making wrinkles in a map.

"Mulatto" by Roxane Beth Johnson

[i-eat-poetry]

What I Do

Eat cereal. Read the back of the box over and over. Put on my red velvet jumper with white heart shaped buttons. Walk to the bus, pick up discarded cigarette butts and pretend to smoke.

Get on the bus. Girls yell, Wire head, ugly black skin. Take a window seat, under the radio speaker. Look for cats hunting in the fields.

Go to class. Stay in at recess. Steal chewing gum, plastic green monkeys and cookies from desks. Eat in bathroom stalls. Pure white light pours in.

Try to get a bloody nose by punching myself in the same bathroom after lunch. 

The teacher passes around pictures of herself pregnant. You were fat! I yell. Everyone laughs. I lap it like licking honey from a spoon. I was pregnant, what's your excuse? Everyone laughs. I swallow stones.

Grow tired in the afternoons, droop like a sunflower in the lengthening light.

Get on the bus. Girls yell, Brillo-head! Zebra! Sit in an aisle seat. Your father's a nigger! I say, No, he's a fireman. Laughter all around. Pinch myself shut like squeezing soap from a sponge.

Walk home. Sometimes find an unsmoked cigarette in the gravel along the curb--long, white, new. Put it to my lips, pull it away and hold it aloft, movie-star-like, all the way home.

[the-final-sentence]

I fold in like saloon doors closing, then swinging out, keeping out thieves.

Roxane Beth Johnson, from "Self-Portrait at Ten"