Jenny Johnson


Spruce Knob

On my own now, I pause

in a patch of freckled light, 

tug clumps of earth back, 


dig a hole in the ground, 

and prepare to poop 

on a chilly mountain summit. 


I can’t name these mosses,

but I know that bears eat them

preparing to hibernate 


because it stops them up good

for months, a natural butt plug. 

It’s so windy spruce branches 


flag away from the wind. 

A trunk is a mast and I am a sail

when I grip a sapling for support,

 

lean back fully and squat, 

feeling the sway of my hands

holding my hands.

Glory and Simplicity

All I know is that no one knows me like you do.

Running at dusk through the starry-eyed snakeroot 

you turn toward the smallest notion, toward what could be nothing—

a fluff of blown seeds, a trance of branching light,

but just once was a tufted parliament of owlets peering back—


Surprise. I am still open to my despair

to disrupting it, not at first noticing 

inches away your hand writing is a fist 

knuckling through its own spiral of shadows 

is someone I’ll never fully know 

howling through tangles of 

jewelweed you know by heart 

is the owls, you say

Symphony Conducted with a Riding Crop

How to ride, to ride, to ride, I could show you 


Gigi, horse of my childhood, with her warm hot flanks


All the girls I never could be in the Apple Blossom Parade tossing flags in the air  


Inside I make my small town salute 


Outside the ninebark swishes through the air


Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a NEA Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program. She lives in Pittsburgh.