Featured Poem • March 2015
Love Song
John Philip Johnson
Delicate as the teal of a sunrise refracted in the mist of the morning bird’s blood on the far hills of Incaldrion Delicate as a youth’s first acid wash, the sparkling orange of fire burning off the layers to the wet sheen that rests beneath Delicate as the moonsingers’s last note after all has been sung, trailing off as though being eaten by the silence, the air-bleeding, pounding silence Delicate as the appetite that wakes at dawn, that takes wing and gathers itself like a fist into the fullness of day As delicately, so delicately, shall your blood and thoughts enter mine, before the floods of confusion and the heartwork of dying, before we enter the drowning pools and are engulfed in their utter calm.
John Philip Johnson has just come out with a collection of graphic poetry, Stairs Appear in a Hole Outside of Town, illustrated by Marvel Comics legend Bob Hall and others. It’s a comic book, and a sample can be found at http://www.rattle.com/poetry/tag/graphic-poetry/. He has work recently published or forthcoming from Rattle, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Niteblade, Daily Science Fiction and Ted Kooser’s newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry.” He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife and three or four of their five children. John, and the comic book, can be reached through his website, www.johnphilipjohnson.com.
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