Poems
by Edward
Johnson
Glove Compartment
You can’t bullshit a cricket.
My fourth chakra is dilated
and my mind is brimming
with locally sourced mindfulness,
a cartography of hills and hollers,
dried conifers all around me,
lodge poles and ecstatic pine sap.
I crushed it at the silent retreat.
Ask any of the facilitators.
Purified by wordlessness,
my body was quiet like a foosball table,
my precise longitude unknown,
my metabolic density measured
in lost plosives and fricatives.
Purified, I ran through the foxglove
of my mind and into the parking lot
because I had Pringles in the glovebox.
The Push/Shove Conundrum
Who are these people in the house
next door? They seem decent enough
as we exchange pleasantries by the
mailboxes but nothing is as it appears.
Shadows stretch backward toward the sun.
Electricians arrive in unmarked vans
to check our glitchy Wi-Fi. Sea lions
bivouac like vagrant bivalves to the
moorage outside of town. Then the raids
begin. Sirens scream through the night.
People are here one day, gone the next.
We were not as ready as we should have been.
History repeats itself. But seriously, here?
And now we have ourselves to think about.
Prioritizing Anxiety
The world is getting hotter.
I couldn’t get tempeh
on my pad see ew last night
because of this supply chain thing
or maybe the great resignation.
Truth is a skipping stone
thrown into the ceiling fan.
Every evening, I run past the tents
as my phone counts my steps.
A toad hops into the window well.
Another bird flies into the double pane glass.
The poor are loathed and villainized.
I’m not the person I’ve claimed to be.
