Poetry by Anya Johnson

     Joseph Gage CC





To the Teeth


Fear too, nipping at the heel. Fear bruising my arms with fingertips of smallness. Pressing down, glancing back. The receding figure of delight. Something I’ve coined anxious immobilization to pathologize freezing of the bones, clicking of the joints. A bad back. A case of hyper-kyphosis my PT called incipient widow’s hump––I thought that unkind. Depression, (Freud called it anger turned inward). So, anger then. Mounds of it. An artillery of anger aimed at young people, at old people, people who have too many children, who chew audibly, who stroll, who clip coupons or ask polite, probing questions. Seasonal depression (that’s just science) except I like winter when there could be wolves anywhere, when you can howl and howl and no one hears. Fatigue––how the days revolt! Think of the Sahara. I’ve never been, but my sister went on retreat in Morocco. Clay tagines, dune-surfing, endless loop of shopping malls. In Marrakech they said she was a real Berber woman, her long blonde hair snaking in the eager sun. Of course she rode a camel. Poor beast, if I rode you I would weep.  





the most intimate thing 


didn’t involve a man’s cock in my mouth 
or a man licking sweat off my sleeping back 
or a man holding me like a measure 
of water, his forehead pressed against mine 
so I was blind when he came, or my first 
orgasm, my calf seared on the tailpipe 
of his bike, the idea of pleasure 
forever fused with the smell of burnt flesh––

                                  it was wrestling the duvet into 
                                  its cover, marrying the loops and ties
                                  to their corresponding corners, getting
                                  it wrong, us on opposite ends of the
                                  bed, the whole mess twisted in the middle
                                  our torsos inside the linen, reaching.

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Goodbye Horses 
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And you say, “All things pass into the night”
And I say, “Oh no sir, I must say you’re wrong
I must disagree, oh no sir, I must say you’re wrong”
               - William Garvey


You told me your heart might stop at any moment, white tee incandescent, Parliament a fixture between your fingers. You must have given me your number then, posturing through the shakes, the infancy of our twin rehabilitation static as an ocean. I want to say you had a tape-deck, slate blue station wagon, mint gum, “Goodbye Horses” on repeat. I loved the defibrillator on your chest, its thumping edges, how it left an arcade claw on my breast when you came inside me; your alien rib-cage, the crime scene scrawl of your torso, how that pulsing body slid through the halfway house window, a powder-blue Christ-on-the-Cross hung over the bed; how you took me to the Mermaid Motel, a mirrored pay-by-the-hour palapa, how we fucked theatrically, management pounding at the door when our allotment ran out; how we stayed as long as we could, our colt-like, fearless bodies reflecting back at us, the refraction of your hair-trigger heart, from which I would never recover; how it was all of three weeks. You came back to me a month or two before you died and I believed, with more faith than any god could inspire, that you’d stay. I climbed a tree to see how you felt before the drop, the shades of blue you might have seen, the recoil, that sharp angle to the ocean; how I was not on your mind, how the obit plucked a strangers’ quote, how she said, I didn’t know you but I saw you jump––paper flew out of your pockets like snow.

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Anya Johnson is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. Her fiction, poetry, and essays can be found in Hobart, Stone Canoe, Scaffold Lit, Counterclock (Emerging Writer’s Award, runner-up), and on poets.org (John B. Santoianni Award, winner). Anya holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the current Poetry Editor for Exposition Review and an Editorial Assistant at Fonograf Editions.
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