Fred Johnson

Joy

After you finish living, you sift
through your every moment like
prospectors for gold, even just
a flake, a hint of it. Shaking

their heads and grinning
are the birches you spent
so long seducing. To their credit,
they never betrayed you.

Now their white is the white
of mothers’ milk, the swim
of branches smooth as eggshell
and just as whole, tentative as that

first caught breath when, at sixteen,
you leaned into the girl who
might have loved you and
whispered something awful.

How she did not draw away—
how nothing, really, ever drew away again.

Run their bark through open palms.
Become a space in air for things to
pass through and, when they do,
shudder, with the joy of it.

Fred Johnson is a British writer and photographer currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University, where he was a 2021-2022 Pearl Hogrefe Fellow. He’s had poetry published in Tilde, Iota, The Incubator, Zetetic Record, Spark, and others, and photography published by Paddler Press and in Reed Magazine. His cats are named Myshkin and Bean.