Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
The Shape of Things
Where a shrine lies buried
below the body’s surface—every act of love
reaches toward the subterranean
lay-line. Even kids playing bloody knuckles
on the school bus, a radical attempt at breaking
into the humming garden where all seasons
drape like silk over the shape of things.
Just as the spine of a lover leaving
carries the declination of a loyalty
to the joints, tendons, disks, places where
we swivel, turning toward the next moment
like a field of sunflowers rising, necks stretched,
our faces seeds, opening.
Stephanie N. Johnson, born in Minnesota, has lived in Alaska and Thailand. Her poems and essays have appeared in Dislocate, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her second collection of poems, Kinesthesia, forthcoming from New Rivers Press in the fall of 2010, and a memoir about hunting and aviation. (2005)