Vapor

1 Minute Read Time

Wind licks the back of your ear-bone the blown back skin
of your face
You vaporize gasoline gleam your crystal blood
glowing across your hand,
your eye imploding in a powder-
light the wind drinks clean with a tongue
that was once yours,
and as the shadow welts the sky as your marrow
melts your brain turns plasma, starcore for an incandescent
moment before each cell molts
turns molten and you blue-shift,
watch from inside the shadow
your flesh become it, smear
its shape against the wall in a black sound, skeletal
as a letter when you first learned it,
your child’s tongue
rolling across the alphabet the way solar wind once rolled
raw matter into planets,
organs failing now in the congealed
particles you are
Don’t be afraid of it it’s only the sunlight
in your sternum
carving a home for silence inside the noise
as silence had once made a soft bed for your voice to dream
its form beyond the prison of a mouth
It was never love only annihilation a tumor, a nebula
the first shadow pressing against the back of a heart

Sara Eliza Johnson

Sara Eliza Johnson grew up in Stratford, Connecticut. She is a graduate of Cornell University. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon and her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Utah. Her first book, Bone Map, won the 2013 National Poetry Series and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2014. Her second poetry book, Vapor, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2022.

Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Boston Review, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Best New Poets, DIAGRAM, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Crab Orchard Review, Tampa Review, Memorious, Vinyl, Pleiades, Meridian, TriQuarterly Online, Gulf Coast, Grist, North Dakota Quarterly, Willow Springs, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Rock & Sling, Territory, Salt Hill, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among others, as well as the anthologies Read Women and February, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series.

She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, a 2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a 2009-2010 and 2015-2016 Winter Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a 2011 work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as fellowships from the University of Oregon and the University of Utah, where she was a Vice Presidential Fellow in the Literature & Creative Writing PhD program and Managing Editor of Quarterly West. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks.

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