In Full Velvet. Jenny Johnson
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lioness, growl, thrust, roll on backs afterward?
Squeaky as killer whales
We could keep contact relentless before
the next sequence, diving deep in a reversed-role
double-helix formation, splashing swagger
to reveal the length of our pink organs Or
we could be lady elephants heading down to the watering hole,
gearing up to gather friends in the yard
for a yipp-purr chorus, hammerhead stork pile-up Or Love
we could pretend to be utter strangers!
I, a house sparrow, and you, a cowbird, hopping over to chatter
until you touch your lower bill, head bowed
to my breast feathers
Our days are charged by so much nature—
The succulents we carry to Alexis in a plastic bag after her surgery
A cat pawing at a mantis behind a windowpane
What we didn’t wash from the lettuce, dirt that’s good danger
Not pristine, not a baseline to harken after romantically
Instead, I read that snowy cities should ready for rising heat, harder rain
Have I come to terms with dominance—what I have trammeled
and fogged with my breath? Flush cut, a redesigned ecology
The dead won’t say how the forest was before we came
And the pheromones I bury my face in under your arms
make me a hazy archaeologist
I must speak of erasure when I long to be leaf-whelmed,
lit by fire pinks and wild sweet Williams How dare
I speak of the marked when I am the diurnal creature damming
the night sky with engineered lights We’ve generated a realm
where we can always see, never see From an aerial
view, here’s my bright address—refracting, scram-
-bling, shutting out the dark O day in the Anthropocene
when I go to pull up buttercups, bare-
fingered, so I can better reach the runners, thin-rooted trams
tunneling invasively Where’s Hope? Hope’s a weed, obscene
on my head, springing white hairs
Like an extinct frog who brought life by opening her mouth,
many froglets bursting out, I brood A quiet storm
at the water’s edge, a bloated cloud, all the roe I’ve swallowed whole
I brood and brood, feeling old Hop in his final state
crying out, I am gall, I am heartburn
Until I feel a blaze unknown
Feel first my lungs deflate, then like a sharpening harp
the stomach acids start to transform
I’m breathing through my skin, as an army grows in full
Will all things return—if I so choose to burp—
in nameless forms?
Summoning the Body That Is Mine When I Shut My Eyes
Come second heartbeat sounding in the breast
Come prismatic light dissembling
Come familiar spirit Come bare-chested in the weeds
Come private imposter Come hidden ballast
Come sudden departures Come stress without shape
Because belief is odd Come swaggering answer
Come invisible ink Come beatific scrawl
Come as squirrels are climbing backwards
Come as dogwood blossoms come apart
Come strumming an unspeakable power ballad
Through a torrent of rain with cheeks flushed scarlet
Come down the rusty metal slide
Come belted kingfisher flapping
Come lavender asters wheeling
Come loose, a sapling lengthening
Come honeysuckle Come glistening
Tail
I picture the shameful length of it poking along behind me as I walk down
Fifth Avenue, the odd sheen of it, shimmering in shop windows,
How after too many beers, I’d lumber back into bed, its strangeness
between my legs.
But as the sun rises—the clean stretch, aesthetic vertebrae—how I might flex its
elegant, careful weight.
Consider my newfound balance, how gracefully I ascend a flight of stairs,
teetering on one leg, my rump poised just so!
Or how I might signal to my lover, wave fondly to her through the air,
lift my fur to tickle her mouth, dash a small crumb off her lips.
In a midnight alley, flashing my snowy underside like a switchblade, we’d sprint
through underbrush.
Had I a tail, I would be luminous and lingering as a comet, who traces the starry night
with a broken ellipsis . . .
*
As a kid, I remember the small green bubble inside the carpenter’s level,
How it would dart from corner to corner,
And how good it felt to straddle the sawhorse, out behind the shed, half tomboy,
half centaur,
How I clenched a two-by-four between my thighbones and it was part of me.
A nest of yellow jackets rose from beneath the splinters and, forgetting how to move,
how to cry, how to run,
I let them sting and sting and sting, eleven times, leaving swells on my arms, neck, legs,
feet, and shoulders.
*
O Lord of Parts, O Holy Tool Shed!
When I rise from these sore bones,
Look what you’ve taken, what you’ve left me—
In Full Velvet
When Aristotle dissected the embryos in bird eggs,
he mistook the spinal cord for the heart.
Anaximander of Miletus wrote that the first humans
burst out of the mouths of fish
and that we took form there
and were held prisoners until puberty.
At its root, taxidermy means to arrange skin.
O Love, how precise is any vision?
*
Gut a body and we’re nothing left but pipes whistling in the breeze.
That’s