Migration

Abstract

Migration Sara Eliza Johnson (bio) We shadows return to the trees, scraping the groundlike a snake shedding its skin, or a wolf lickinga chest cavity, or your teeth against my neckin the dream I can’t stop having, though I movewith the herd now, an alphabet growingunder my skin, wind tracing each letterwith its tongue, learning its form. Who erasedyour face? the wind asks. How do you seewithout eyes? If I could answer I would sayI see as nectar tunneling through a moon.Not through glass, but as dark that learns to love itself,as cloud tissue, as the black glue that holdseach thing together, though light would separate it.I see as the tiny ripple that moves through musclebefore an earthquake or massacre, the wordopening its lesion, the blood of the martyras it exits the wrist. I see through the hole in my chestthat breathes as black holes had breathedagainst the eyes of astronomers.I reach the forest. The trees are soft enoughto push a hand through. I find mine among themand ready to begin the long work of growingaway from the sunlight that still laps its memoryat the edge of my mind, I break my spine, foldmyself inside, and become paradise. [End Page 86] Sara Eliza Johnson Sara Eliza Johnson’s first book, Bone Map (Milkweed Editions, 2014), was selected for the 2013 National Poetry Series. Her poetry has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Boston Review, Copper Nickel, and Salt Hill, among others, and nonfiction has appeared in DIAGRAM and AGNI. She is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Philip Freund Alumni Prize from Cornell University. Copyright © 2019 Middlebury College Publications