As I Was Saying
The water hammer kept us up last night. It seemed to know everyone there. As I approached the exit a woman asked if I had found everything I was looking for. Any second now it would all come back to her: how we’d met, what we’d meant to each other. Angels on the beach, with seaweed hair and sand dollar eyes, were turning shorebirds to stone. In the boardwalk arcade plastic moles popped up. A child beat them down delightedly. She was so small her father carried her in his coat pocket.
John Johnson’s poems have appeared in many print and online journals, most recently in SurVision, Sky Island Journal, Clade Song, Triggerfish Critical Review and The Inflectionist Review. He is co-translator, with Terry Ehret and Nancy J. Morales, of Plagios/Plagiarisms, the poetry of Ulalume González de León, winner of the 2021 Northern California Book Award for poetry in translation.