Abby Johnson
—
To Drink the River Lethe Dry
I stuck my finger into the skin where the stitches were, out oozed the
sunset, it made me anxious.
In examination of the wound, I found a stunning lack of emptiness.
The skin was kissing its cousin, puckering closed with influence of
thread, but love cannot keep closed an open.
My kingdom for a crooked memory: a skin with no scars, a stunning
lack of sunset, no muscle tensed to flinch.
In the absence of cause, there is the bloody instinct. Body lives a life I
take no part in, owns a catalogue of memories inaccessible.
Memory makes me a sensitive beast. My inefficiency knows no bounds.
I trot out into the woods to fur myself in moss on the cold
side of the tree. It makes me anxious. I misremember the simplest
name, but hear every bodily phenomenon in the pitch it was intended.
Abby Johnson is a poet and a Hoosier who is proud of the local art scene that fostered her. She is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing through Butler University. She is interested in the effect of Middle America on the voices of those who live there. She is previously unpublished.
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