Issue 3 – Winter 2002 – Bryan M. Johnson

Bryan M. Johnson

 

The Most Photographed Burning Skyscraper in America

Relatives and hair, missing flamboyants. I am re-established, riderless 
and on the road. I am sad for the strokes and night 
flowers, I am sad for the axes. I have worn a toga. Like air 
and fallow sex you keep nibbling my ear my black cricket. Love me 
you love me and love me some more.

See my breathstroked hair, see my intensive. Rain keeps falling, roses are on 
the metal. Trillium winds face you down into footage and I am sad 
as antique lakes, cities are tender and waist-deep in mist walled down 
and tickled your theatre’s naked aperture like starched and splendored 
anybody’s pink, pink and sweet.

The day sequel, empty noises coming in and Horation. See how 
history and history’s dark arrondissements so doubly loved the city’s 
hiatus. In the morning of lovely grief and arteries, a jeremiad 
of wagons and furzed beauty is the body you keep. Like a road poem, 
aubade of hate and love

a ghazal falls from the low sky and film is your very love, the tarmac 
swaddled in pyre.

 

Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot

Morganatically excited, sufficiently sentimental? Your muslin goes 
everywhere. Of parrots and cicadas, arms extending to perch, you see 
candied dates, dossiers, your blue blouse and serious 
swans.

Rapturously assured, calling one another tu? You two courtesans 
pregnant and older than opera eggs, the world is mended elsewhere. To see is 
love’s necropolis, your smallest Pierre ill-starred as a sick old 
hen.

When did you turn on the solemn vow, your well-brushed coital 
prose, smiling hand to mouth? Of red berries and spectacles, your doves 
non-pictorial and too light for words, a felicity smiles in the mirror, dreaming 
of beautiful birds.

Good bye you strangely shy and brightly bellied. Kiss me and
kiss me. 

 

 

Bryan M. Johnson has had poems appear in New American Writing, American Letters & Commentary, and The Denver Quarterly. He has work forthcoming in The Paris Review. He teaches poetry and literary theory at Samford 
University.

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