Blackbirdan online journal of literature and the artsFall 2018  Vol. 17 No. 2
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an online journal of literature and the arts
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back SARA ELIZA JOHNSON

Wormhole
structure linking separate points in space-time,
like a tunnel

Once the sky was still a blue membrane
that rippled over you, breathed

into you, when the forest was still
pine and clouds, so your hands

smelled of pine and clouds, trout scales
shining them for days.

Now the trees are shadows burned
into wind, as if frozen mid-implosion.

My hands won’t move
but my wrist vein wrinkles with a pulse

and I hear the blood
in the shadow I am in this forest:

all of us shadows in rows, growing like roots
down from the white lake of sky.

When my vision parts I see the other side:
seconds there like scales glittering

through a break in a river,
the forest there still growing arterial,

and I know the veins will meet
and merge, a transfusion of particles,

and there I will tear my body from its hold
and pull your body from the lake

and suck the blood from your lungs
and replace it with my breath

and clothe you in my skin,
which once was your shadow

cast across the path in the forest
we once walked together, two objects

impossibly colliding, a clot
in a rippling tunnel of wind.  


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