have there ever been two people
more careful with each other?
you –
carrying your brimming heart
as a small child carries a glass
of milk – slowly moving forward,
worried of spilling.
me –
watching the small, brown bird
I long to touch, hardly daring
to hold a hand out, in case it
might light there.
these years of closed throats and steady
eyes, twitchy fingers tapping out
the morse code of our regret,
until the words come tumbling, round
as riverstones, smooth as cobbles, louder
than the water sucked back, stuttering,
to the ocean – one, two, three.
Sonja Johanson writes in a sunny room overlooking the hills of Boston, and she had three chapbooks released in 2015: Trees in Our Dooryards (Red Bird Press), Impossible Dovetail (Silver Birch Press, IDES) and all those ragged scars (Choose the Sword Press). She is overseen by two ginger and one piebald writing supervisors, all of whom think her time would be better spent preparing herring.