I Know You, Little Rider
Something about Rabbits
The Between
How Long How Far
Boy, 8
Home Is Where You Leave Your Dead
Our Lady of the Wayside
New Orleans
Field Trip, the Refinery
My Son Told Me
Return to a Place That Does Not Love Me
St. Jesus Pharmacy
place is everything
take it away and where are you
kids bouncing in the back seat
in the way back kids disguised as cargo
a dog runs out his lead on a clothesline
tries to catch our car before his collar yanks
the outside blurs
Cape Girardeau Dyersburg
you swallow every swerve
on the passage to the new house
your body heaves
carsick
I know you little rider
I know the aftertaste of leaving home
whatever home means
when they say get in and you have to get in
I too live in the urgent world with urgent fears
but when I close my eyes and that dark pulse settles
I see cold the long field of snow behind my house
the whitened trees in the distance a bleached landscape
achingly quiet in its frozen restriction
the snow enforcing a silence that hurts the ears
as much as the cold does—a hat is not enough
I need ear muffs too that concentrate the silence
and center it in my breath my hum my bloodbeat—
and because everybody in my family
was born in the South—if you can count Missouri
and I do—we have thin blood scant cold weather gear
and no experience so our muffs are faux plush
our boots too short and no one stops me from walking
in late afternoon through the meadow and pine woods
to see my classmate who lives on the other side
my shadow leaping ahead through that field of white
blank except for the tracks my feet leave they sink
at every step snow drifting into my boots
and near the tree line I spot a rabbit’s pink eye
and ear its white fur camouflaged against the snow—
it’s gnawing bark at wood’s edge to keep from starving
silent and so frightened its back paws flip urine
as it bounds into the same woods I have to trudge
to get to the girl’s house to warm my icy feet
numb face why don’t I turn back join my sisters and
brothers under blankets by the blaring TV
something about rabbits their meekness bothers me
and why is a severed paw lucky I wonder
as I cross from cold to colder in almost dark
this stretch of highway
an evergreen postcard on the way
from your wintry house to town
its median dense with trees
cedar soldiers packed tight
the between place
splits the highway
you come to town on one side
leave on the other
if you need to be sick
he’ll have to pull over
onto the plowed verge
a narrow strip in front of the trees
you’ll heave on old snow
lean against bark
if you want to run away
you can’t squeeze between trunks
the stockade of trees
cold shoulders for miles
he’ll pull out through slush
back onto the highway
nowhere to go
but the ragged edge of town
the body shop
the bowling alley &
its broken lot
the 24 hour store
its apron of sidewalk
where the boys hang out
& laugh at the wind
as they light up
did the highway fool you
did you think you
were going somewhere
once a year The Wizard of Oz on TV
and popcorn popped in a stock pot
with a melted stick of butter
served in a paper grocery bag
how long ago this was
how far
cake that tasted like cigarettes
weeks of measles of mumps
if their hearts attacked
the dads died young
teens died in crashes
miscarriages—every mom had one
when you left the house
you were loose in the world
lost to them would you
come back by midnight
I had to borrow the house phone
call from the party make
an excuse always a chance
they’d forgive my lateness
so much of our lives spent
missing calls missing each other
not getting messages
not knowing who needed us
that time the line
rang and rang
while I stood still dressed for a Latin banquet
in a Roman stola
and they couldn’t answer
because they were
running after the gurney
that held their boy
same loop every day curve around the yield sign
by houses so familiar they disappear
unless the boy is outside
chasing his ball
past trees that bend discreetly away from windows
under the overpass where the radio fades
brief shadow
onto the highway one two lights
and it matters or why would it
need to be studied so diligently
repeated two three times a day
the route absorbed
the boy changing imperceptibly
a haircut a missing tooth
trees thinner after a storm
a few branches harmless in the side yards
the other cars fluid looping their loops
in that time lapse a peaceful town
appreciates
holding nothing in keeping nothing out
content to be a crossing a crossroad
and though who you are on Friday
is not who you were on Thursday
the boy doesn’t catch his ball and turn to stare
the lights don’t flash
the car is senseless the car doesn’t know
it killed the car runs free
Home Is Where You Leave Your Dead
my sister is not eternal
she eats a little celery
to keep going
she’s given instructions
take her ashes
to Chardon
our mother’s too
and from the top
of the closet
our father’s urn
it must be a road trip
the compact family
nestled
in the back seat
let the priest
bless us
from a distance
without specificity
we’ll smuggle them in
through rough hedges
of juniper berries
blue as veins
I like November
for this task
bleak and honest
a brief reunion
settle them here
once and for all
spill the ash
I went back
of course I did
the winter of the silent car
I drove across Ohio
only wind wipers
the tat tat of light sleet
I passed the courthouse
the church of yellow brick
default saint
on a flat sign
a common name
no Our Lady of the Wayside
townspeople caught
in a diorama—
librarian’s hand on the glass door
skinny boy with gas pump
a hatless man his shovel
poised above the walk
would I know the place
from the highway
of course I pulled over
traffic whipping past
didn’t recall the ditch
the moat of slush
coat open
car door hanging open
I stood in weather
in cutting sleet
I bowed my head to it
the hard teacher
three times she died
and came back
benzos not opioids
D swears benzos are worse
I flew down to help
D reached into a basket
hung by her door
if you find me passed out my
lips blue
pull off the cap with your teeth
like this
punch the needle in my thigh
I didn’t know how to survive there
the falter in my step the thirst
I was still drinking
I crossed the unfamiliar
buckled porches ruined gardens
wind chasing plastic cups
I was promised a washer dryer
in the first Airbnb
there was only a nook
bristling with wires
and a gouge in the floor
where the machines had gone
behind the steamy
windows of the laundromat
a woman bent forward
arms clutching her stomach
as she stared at
the dryer’s spinning drum
I recognized her face
I saw it every time
I startled in the mirror
one night I stayed
at D’s friends’ house
across the hall from
their collection of exotic
snakes & spiders
each trapped and secure
I was assured—
but to see them moving
in their cages
like bad thoughts—
I sat in the swampy yard
with the snake people
smoking a joint
that was disloyal
I regret it
D could not stand
by herself
the morning of her appointment
we took a cab
I strapped on her seatbelt
she came out of that clinic
the way she went in
soft-boned a puddle of a girl
if you’re fucked up by choice here
they treat what they can and send you off
no judgment no lecture
here D said they understand
we sat on a concrete stoop
tried to eat lunch
from a styrofoam box
the wind in New Orleans
hot full of grit
kept blowing away
our napkins my scarf
early each morning I called rehab
looking for an open bed
finally the voice on the line
bring her in
I brought her in
I stood outside
the barred windows
the remote-controlled door
the public hospital
across the street
drive-thru margaritas
the boulevard its confederate statue
in pieces
the saxophonist on the corner
playing for change
a skeletal city on the Mississippi
all sticks and struts
a spreading tank farm
and smokestacks that spewed
and flamed into the sky
boys and girls in small patrols
we entered the rackety hot room
and climbed to a catwalk
high above the industrial danger zone
the first stage in distilling oil
whose daddy works here
who has to do this dirty work so
we could run our cars
not to mention
the man shouted over the clatter
of machines
plastic
nylon
crayons and did he say
chewing gum
all this for all that
and kids don’t worry
about those plumes of smoke
harmless steam letting itself out
*
I drove for days
to Louisiana
burned tanks of fuel
to see my son who threw his body
into trenches to protest a pipeline
through Cancer Alley
illegal the courts ruled
the hard hats kept digging
guarded by moonlighting deputies
that summer I married the car
everything tasted of oil
the roadside food my sweat
I smelled oil’s stink on my t-shirt
it wasn’t just gasoline
I’d walked through a cauldron
in Baton Rouge as a child
and that fumy air got into me
crossed the skin barrier
it lives here
in this place
also in me
how he swam across a field of wheat
how night swallowed him
how he surfaced at a crossing
how he fell on his shoulder
following tracks
how he stumbled into a railroad graveyard
wandered a maze of exhausted machines
rust absorbing the moonlight
how he heard the guard
and climbed into a boxcar
how he held his breath
while gravel shifted and scraped
how he made a withered apple last
wrote a silent song
drowsed in heat amplified by metal
how he could have found a way out—
the guard made such a predictable circuit—
but the sunset was too beautiful
how he took in the sky
like the rafters of a vast hangar
pearl shading to pink to magenta
the speed of these segues over industrial wreckage
so arresting
he couldn’t hide from it
how his face was spotted in the door
how he gave himself up
fell out
bummed a smoke from the bull
got hauled to jail
how he was charged with trespassing against
an acronym
how the bail I posted sprang his ass
how he tucked the summons in his pants
caught the next tornado
rode it almost to Coeur d’Alene
Return to a Place That Does Not Love Me
once more I’ve found myself
at the Stop ’n Shop
its parking lot scorched asphalt
hot dog steam in the vestibule
fundraiser for our veterans
my head ticking
mozzarella pasta coffee
I dodge the maze of mounded
produce the crowded deli
trout stare from crushed ice
I check myself out
and as the robot scanner says
move your chicken wings
I feel the pressure behind my eyes
like tears for the republic
or my children’s childish years
I roll my spoils to the locked car—
and take in the still life on front seat
that is my phone my keys
marooned I’m marooned
on this blacktop desert
swarming not an hour ago
with urgent commerce
gulls circle the cart corral
they know the lot is built
on landfill on garbage
the shell-pink sky purples
I have shopped
I have stopped
in a place that cannot love me
eee eee eee the gulls screech
for this we gave up
oceans for this
we abandoned the sea
I climb from the subway
to the sidewalk to the shadows
of stone buildings high windows
blinking at the bridge
my pilgrimage to the neighborhood
of the business of medicine
bones nerves veins hearts
and the pharmacy of St. Jesus
named for the saint template
the model healer in whose
hands might our fevers be cooled
I’m one more soul in traffic
as we drift into the street
clutching papers faces atilt
signs and numbers
obscured by scaffolding by double-
parked vans and panel trucks
in deep November
and the invisible wind
I’ve come for you look
I’m almost here
almost to your restless bed
I feel your pulse
as I touch the door
Marilyn A. Johnson's poetry has appeared most recently in Plume, RHINO, Pedestal, Salamander, and The Provincetown Independent. She is the author of three non-fiction books, including The Dead Beat. She’s lived in ten states and can be found now in New York and at marilynjohnson.net.
