When We Think of Love

By on Feb 8, 2015 in Poetry

Dried up flower with hearts

What we think, when we think of love:
the night out of which young women
are plucked; our own nights of solitude;
loss, interminable, or its possibility, fuel

for the precautions taken; fermentation,
yeast loving sugar, dough rising under
the floured sheet; the sea loving the shore
furiously, wave after percussive wave; whole
colonies of plankton loved by gray whales;

the trees outside this house love autumn so
much they shake with pleasure when it returns;
ice loving water until it dissolves completely,
like flesh into the earth. What they’ll find centuries
hence: the graves, or their outline, the sweet loam

taking its time—the worms having loved,
the expendable love of maggots—eye sockets
are almost eyes, skull, collarbone, lean femur,
prehensile extension of thumb, digits splayed,
the act of love, not a salve, but a solvent.

About

Kasey E. Johnson received a B.A. in English from Reed College and an M.A. in English Literature from the University of New Mexico. She works for a healthcare non-profit in Seattle, Washington, and is an editorial assistant and book review editor for CALYX, A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Corium Magazine, decomP, Prick of the Spindle, Silver Birch Press, and Verdad.