National Poetry Month Day 12: Jenny Johnson
Good Bully
My first good bully was the leaves.
Their dry cover, their easy weight.
A wish to be briefly buried
it lives inside of me, old urge
to stay in deep in yard debris,
in folded stalks of goat’s beard,
tendrilled kinks of cucumber vine,
where millipedes are always on
the run, where anything goes,
where a parasitized hornworm
might be splitting open from within.
The death layer a friend calls it.
The bin wherein we disowned
the parts of us that we thought
would not serve our survival.
I return for the density –
brambles, cupped shapes of smashed
cocoons, this pleasure pummel state,
return to say yes, hold me
down if it’s on my terms;
yes, smear this queer; yes,
to each brightly etched scratch.
Because the pinprick at the center of
Queen Anne’s Lace is called
the fairy seat, the dark purple lip,
almost black, lie back
on your throne, Fairy, bleed.
Good Bully
Girl fight! Someone would yell,
and we’d all run into the hall to
see who. Though that wasn’t how
you came to clip my cheek.
At sixteen, the sun was setting
when you read a flinch in me,
eyed the taut bend in kindling
too green to snap. Meet me
on the pitcher’s mound, you required.
That I said yes, I remember,
to your hand, but never yes to
your lips – the education in this.
***
Author photo courtesy of author