by Nell Johnson

Parable


Once again you are in the corner;
you are a spider I once defended:
He is more afraid of you than you are
of him. So long clearing your cobwebs,
their sticky trappings on my hands,
sweeping long dead legs into a dustpan.
Still no one knows my memories 
like you, not even my father: alien books,
tri-tones, ½ lb bag of candies, black and red 
and white, the weight of all the sugar.
Never have I ever seen myself reflected
until you, a scorpion on a frog’s back.
At once we are exoskeletal and fleshy,
the sunken and the poisoned.  






Fairlawn


Full of bread I walk around the cemetery,
a tendril of lettuce hanging off my sleeve. 
I think of the headstone of a trucker 
killed in a head-on collision, the engraved cab 
and the mud in its depressions, yellow twigs 
of grass at the foot, the names of the five sons 
he left forming a long list down the other side. 
I used to go to him before my grandparents. 
I used to mourn him. I used to imagine 
holding his sons while they drunk themselves 
into nothing and marrying each one 
in a row ending with the one most like his father. 
I circle around thousands of bodies and back 
to the car, leaving the meaning 
underneath, the life, what is now mine.





 
Miss Brigitte


She lines up matzo on paper plates for Passover
and we grind salt-soaked parsley in our molars 

in the classroom across from the fellowship hall. 
Neither of us care much for Sunday school, 

but we do care about God, about finding Him 
on the Internet, Adobe Flash games and YouTube 

and americangirl.com, flickering blue
light on Jesus’ face as He watches us add plastic 

Mary Janes to our shopping cart, bedazzle
pixel Delilah with a sequin gown, grateful.

Nell Johnson (Aries Sun, Capricorn Rising) holds a B.A. in English and Russian from the University of New Mexico and works for her hometown public library. She has been published in Bending Genres, 45th Parallel, and Cordella Magazine.