Luke Johnson

May 24th 2022

Today the birds are gone
    & the grass (can you see it?)
smothers under summer’s
   thumb & tumbles toward

the street. Clocks consume
    the hours as my sons
stack cards & scribble in silence—
    daughter under her bed.

She too has heard the gunshots
    dreamt of blood the bodies
of friends’ gone rogue with static
    & wonders why when jackals

eat they watch the wounded
    suffer. But what of light
that lingers? Slants against
    the rotted gate & freckles

what the darkness won’t,
     a web or muddied mitten.
I boil water. Turn salt & bone
     to broth & soup & slurp

until my shirt’s wet. My
    lover’s quiet with her
breasts exposed & covered
     in the news. She tells me

of a woman who hopped
     a fence to pull her babies
through an open window
     of a father smashed

into the ground despite his
    daughter’s calls. So I play
Leanord Warren. Pace the yard.
    Pray. Sharpen the knives. Imagine

the last note lifted as his heart
    imploded, the Metro stilled
in its sound. Yet maybe it wasn’t
    his heart that gave out

but the burden of song built
    by sadness, every abject
terror. A scream. One looped
    melody. The head of a horse

& the buzzards who bored
     it. A barely legible tongue.

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Luke Johnson poems can be found at Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, Florida Review, Frontier, Cortland Review, Nimrod, Thrush and elsewhere. His manuscript in progress was recently named a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, The Levis through Four Way Press, The Vassar Miller Award and is forthcoming fall 2023 from Texas Review Press. You can find more of his poetry at lukethepoet.com or connect at Twitter at @Lukesrant.