Brian Johnson

Confederacy

Mismatched pupils: a blue, a brown. Speckled teeth.
Monuments below grade. Late photographs gone missing.

Substitute teachers descended from birds: Falcon, Wren, Veery.
Blondes, statuesque, with their bald spots.

Names with an extra letter: Llama, Aaron.
Some negligible sky. An illegible line of flags.

Violin in a mobile home park. Wings, innards, by fencepost.
The word Allimay applied to the snow.

Sandboxes with dogs in them. Lazy smoke in the cricket glades.
People stopped on a highway ramp. Cloudlessness. Long–covered furniture.

Brian Johnson is the author of Torch Lake and Other Poems, a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award, and Site Visits, a collaborative work with the German painter Burghard Müller–Dannhausen. He is the recipient of two Connecticut Commission on the Arts Fellowships and former editor of Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters and Commentary, Massachusetts Review, West Branch, and many other journals.

More from Vol. 33, Issue 2

Dormant

Tasha Cotter

Ungulate in the Penthouse of the Winter Tick // The Mute Button

David Dodd Lee

Confederacy

Brian Johnson

Reversal: The Movement of Laozi's Dialectical Dao

Laozi, trans. Wong Yoo-Chong

Verses to an Unknown Soldier

Osip Mandel’shtam, trans. Don Mager