THE WEATHER

by Edward Johnson

Fruit beckons, we don’t know what
If anything is beyond these trees.
Before video, film. Before film, what?
Cocker spaniels, charcoal sketches?

America is like the groom’s brother
As he stands before the gathered,
Glass raised. We’re rooting for this dude
But dollars to donuts he will embarrass us
For being here, for taking part.

I first glimpsed it in 1974
But it was a full half century
Before I saw it free and clear
Right here on this couch in these underwear
The shroud of these decades burnt into me.

Greed hides in plain sight.
The system is working as designed.
Fort Knox is theater—
Money protects itself.

Fear is imported by the truckload
Microdoses by the thimble.
Fortunately, not everyone ejaculates
On queue like a trained seal.

Bernadette Dohrn knew this.
Speaking of burning shit down
How are your hips and knees holding up?
We are about to be activated.

EQUITY ABHORS A FORFEITURE

The front edge of a frantic three-day,
Vaxxed and boosted, stocked up
On nut butters, spread-eagled
On stolen land where wolverines
Once hunted in couples and throuples
Along this denuded ravine.

Nearby a conclave of wet nurses
Pauses to stage a selfie
By a cow-tipped porta-potty,
La Pieta, the Massacre at Wounded Knee,
A backslash, an ellipsis, a black sash.
Time spills and sputters, a sprinkler
Of double helixes, half eaten Funyons.

We rut and rumble, shudder and stall,
A husk of our former engorgements.
Our teeth ache. Our feet no longer
Quite fit our shoes, the ground
Is confettied with face masks,
Orange needle caps and cigarette butts—
Like splayed bullet casings,
Proof of a second gunman.

Our wastewater surges and wanes
With antibodies. We shimmy and hump.
Sunbeams refract and coalesce
Above what used to be Embers,
Abandoned but still haunted
By drag queens, stale beer
And bass throbbing up from the throat
Of every urinal.
Replacements replace the replaced.
We cosplay and mansplain.
We play preordained charades.
Who doesn’t love a parade?

MEETING OF THE MINDS

Why doesn’t Zoom have a middle finger
Instead of that throbbing heart?
Quarantined in a breakout room
We do two truths and a lie:
        (i)        Capitalism craps out poverty;
        (ii)       Christianity is a book club gone awry;
        (iii)      I pee in sinks.
Shadows dissect my screen.
I look like a hostage in a storage unit.
Connectivity is fleeting.
Cedar waxwings gobble mosquitoes.
Some say the world exists
Beyond this tunnel of Wi-Fi.
I touch my knees,
Throw nonsense into the chat—
Mardi gras, coleslaw, coupe de grâce.
Nobody seems to notice.
The number of participants
Flickers, readjusts, unstable.
The earth spins, an ampersand on fire
Hurtling through various life spans.
Saltshakers stand like sentinels,
I flash the laugh till crying reaction
Every four minutes or so
No matter what is being said.
Voices upload to the cloud
Someone shares their scree
A pie chart with one huge piece
And so many tiny ones that
They must’ve nearly run out of colors,
Dump trucks full of words
Beep backwards into the void.

NEXT WEEK

Every Friday at ten
A funnel of light emanates
From my fourth chakra.
Zoom conjures my therapist
From the viral mist:
Her name, her pronouns, her blurred diploma.
We flirt a little, two camels
Nosing around the tent.
I tell her how I sometimes
Wake myself up laughing,
An experience I find
Not altogether amusing.
She looks out past her screen
And tilts her head.
Beyond her gaze: the Chown Pella,
The West Hills, Intel,
The Coastal Range levitates
And jackknifes into the sea.
I tell her about my mom’s lasagna—
The Velveeta and meat sauce,
The layers of labial noodles.
I tell her I have regrets,
Moments of intense shame
Tamped down and flattened
Like marzipan. I tell her
I don’t know exactly
What marzipan is,
But I know it’s a dessert thing,
Not a country in Africa.
Zoom alerts us we have five minutes.
We stare at ourselves
Staring at one another
A single string in a cat’s cradle,
One floss away,
One calisthenic away,
A marble thorked
By some huge God-thumb.
We are drinking from the firehose.
We are building the plane as we fly it.
We may not be wearing pants.
I mention how certain words—
Cellar, socket, analgesic—
Transcend what they signify.
She smiles and suggests that we
Pick it up right here next week.

BIO

Edward Johnson is a civil rights attorney who has spent the past 30 years representing people living on and over the edge of homelessness. One of his cases involving the fundamental rights of people forced to live outside, Johnson v. Grants Pass, went to the Supreme Court of the United States in 2024. He is currently living in a cabin in the North Cascades working on poems, old and new. He has work recently out or forthcoming from Eclectica Magazine, Beatnik Cowboy, Indefinite Space, Main Street Rag, Ginosko Literary Journal, Packingtown Review, The Dissident Voice, Evergreen Review, Whisk(e)y Tit Journal, Abraxas Review, Dog Throat Journal and Litbreak.