Luke Johnson
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Here is where your daddy thread a knife through the mother deer's belly and bellowed when your fingers found the fawn and pulled it, wilted from the body's cave, both eyes puddled and still. Where once, on a walk, when fog had crept its muddy swill over the flash of flood lights, you hid your face afraid the Lord would spit, his right hand raised to strike. You, half-nude, cock still throbbing wet, having joined a woman twice your age and tasted where the womb began, its brine the beauty of cream, bent like one before a whip to pay your filthy penance. You bad boy dumb boy you never enough boy, you fed the body what it craved and cowered by the climbing rose that choked the wooden trellis. How dare you. Didn’t you hear the woman weep while wandering out to find you, her voice like something slick and fraught sought for someplace to drink, a body to wear, begged you in from the cold. You cradled the fawn. You offered it back to the snow and your daddy said here by which he meant sip, to swallow the moon’s graffiti. |
Luke Johnson lives on the California Coast with his wife and three kids. His poems can be found or forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Florida Review, Narrative Magazine, Nimrod, Thrush, Valparaiso Review, Tinderbox, Cortland Review, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and his chapbook, :boys, was published by Blue Horse Press in 2019.