Geode You remember: the moon over the city had been eaten by worms. You remember how it had no face, how the windows were iced honeycombs as your mother left the church with a basket of cured meat and eggs and bread covered with a handkerchief, your mother walking and her shadow, your mother her body at night a plot of dirt and her blue eyes the first flowers the wind permits, and ahead a white horse plodding its carriage past soldiers with machine guns--the scrape, scrape of horseshoes on stone--and the wind- warp of a train, and the snow swell through an alley like blood rushing into a brain cavity. Think of all this. How each skull, like a geode, holds a crystal colony inside: a glittering of synapse, quartz- glints of dreams you have not had, mirror- bits of other faces and cities you know because someone has told you them. Any bullet there could have been hers. Any one could have made a hole in her head. Then crystals would have bled into the air, onto the wind like the snow wafting into the house through the window you forgot to close which is why, you realize, you are shivering. Black Hole Six hundred and forty light years away, star is dying, shedding cells into the expanse, dragging trails of gas and dust across space the way horses drag the moon across the field with their tails. The astronomers at the observatory think they can see it: the star wheeling back, the star caving in like an eye sunk to the bottom of an ocean. There a white dot forms, the spot where everything deforms: a crushable pearl, a word plucked from a tongue. Or ripped from it, like yours. The men had held you down on the ground, cut out your tongue for a word they could not translate. Now when you open your mouth, nothing comes out but a mangled river of black sap, as if you are speaking underwater, and when your voice returns it will be as a birdcall in spring, on a planet of eyeless and earless birds. Home All the trees in the backyard have my disease, all crooked, sad things that shake and bend at the threat of teeth or touch, bleed sugar and rust. I think I'm afraid to stop bleeding because it means sleeping forever. On one island grows a tree called dragon's blood that bleeds red sap, and arthropods bleed blue threads, the blackfin icefish bleeds clouded milk and far south a glacier bleeds iron oxide that still feeds an ancient ecosystem. Even flower stems bleed latex. Everything bleeds. Still, nothing so beautiful lives inside me, nothing like the tenderness of horses, their trembling eyelids and tangled manes. Sometimes I cry in the cafe bathroom, the car, behind a tree, so no one will see. Sometimes I drive out to visit a stranger's horses just to be near them, stand with them awhile with my empty hand outstretched like another animal, dark and small, coming out into the light for the first time. Excerpted from Vapor: Poems by Sara Eliza Johnson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
