Through the Window
Losing love can be like that—
like being locked back inside
the house where you spent
so many days staring out the
window, but now with the
knowledge that the trees hold
concerts, symphonies of birds,
every morning and the grass
sways to the tender song, each
blade moving in perfect harmony;
like noticing the pattern of the
window screen for the first time, the
unavoidable distortion it casts
over your view, coupled with
every finger smudged on the glass;
like cleaning the windows a
dozen times a day, polishing
every inch until it’s crisp and
clear, and ripping out the screen
and filing away the edges;
like doing all that work to
make the view through the
window as real as possible
and then closing the curtains
so you don’t have to watch.
• • •
Trickling from the Faucet to a Single Point
So what if I’ve quit waking near
my dreams, I’ve seen the future,
the resolution of all lines, trickling
from the faucet to a single point.
***
The future ends like this:
One day, you wake up and
it’s almost your birthday/
almost Christmas/ almost/
almost/ almost—
and then, the next day,
it’s Christmas
and tomorrow it won’t be
and tomorrow is today
and tomorrow was fifteen
minutes ago
and you’re late for today
and then it’s always today
and you never make it
to tomorrow
and even if you did,
it just looks like today
again
and even if you did—
and it’s always today
and it’s always today
and it’s always almost
tomorrow
and you’re always early
and the door is always locked.
• • •
Quinn Carver Johnson was born and raised on the Kansas-Oklahoma border. He currently attends Hendrix College where he is pursuing a degree in English with a focus in creative writing. His work has appeared both online and in-print in various places, including, must recently, Right Hand Pointing and Dragon Poet Review. He recently self-published a collection of poems entitled If You Shut Your Eyes and Are a Lucky One.
Todd Fuller has two books published, 60 Feet Six Inches and Other Distances from Home: the (Baseball) Life of Mose YellowHorse (Holy Cow! Press, 2002) and To the Disappearance (Mongrel Empire Press, 2015). His first book has been optioned for a screenplay, tentatively titled A Dancing Red Spine, which he is co-writing with his wife.