Night Letters (October 2020)
Dear—
Nearly full moon lifting
above mountains sky deepening
towards sunset and that moon so suddenly
huge I stopped on my bike in the street hungry
for that realness that body that rock
reflecting sunlight mundane and powerful
translucent the way only the moon
before sunset can be
I stopped
on my way home riding American streets
lined with signs and flags touting our
two countries hostilities unfolding
in the air all around me and I rode
through it anxious that there will be
no end to the ways we delude ourselves
speaking past one another signals crossing silent
in mid-air I do it all the time unwilling
to disagree out loud filled by the fury
I let settle inside me
I have been looking
at the moon all my life haven’t you too
eating its image that light somewhere
in our cells waxing towards fullness
Don’t you want to name it that feeling
of seeing your life at a distance
lit by all it cannot hold
Waiting,
Night Letters (November 2020)
Dear—
Washed out haze
of nights with Saturn and Jupiter
blazing like faces distant enough
to be safe How can they be
other worlds I ask myself all the time
without ever asking it to see my way
out of darkness
I’ll tell you plainly
a neighbor I’ve never seen walked out
of his house with a shotgun and shot
through teachers’ cars parked at the school
between us his house kitty-corner from mine
cats and pigeons hunched together at the curb
outside his house all I knew of him some truce
between them to sit like that fed on
whatever he unseen put out
I wasn’t home
that morning my neighbors and the internet
offering scraps of that hour the masked
woman walking her dog his voice caustic
across the open air screaming communists
I’m gonna start the next Civil War
He did not come for her as he said
he would no body in the line of fire
the bullets’ path into metal and across
the playground emptied for months
teachers sheltering in a bathroom inside
Over the bullhorn the police negotiator
did her work calm coaxing
him to walk out again
For weeks after
the landlord hauled out garbage a ghost
turned out onto the curb
for everyone to see the neighbor
still in custody remote as any light
I cannot reach I pray then neglect my prayers
for him for the school for neighbors I see
never or daily
Today I walked out
and saw Venus and Mercury those steady
lights against dawn and I watched
for them to fade
Wondering,
Julie Swarstad Johnson is the author of Pennsylvania Furnace (Unicorn Press, 2019) and co-editor of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (The University of Arizona Press, 2020). She lives in Tucson and works as an archivist and librarian at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Header photo by Matías Candia, courtesy Pexels. Photo of Julie Swarstad Johnson by Patri Hadad.
