This month’s poem, “Cold Smoke” by Joseph Johnson, belongs to a special category of lyric: elusive because it shows itself so clearly, conveying its own articulateness while reserving what it’s articulate about. That reserve takes many forms: an absented subject, an oblique object, loosely organized ways of life. Johnson’s poem turns the paradox of the poetic image into living matter: something close, made grave or unsettling by its surroundings—frozen, spare, a little stricken, not without ornament. Swerves in diction become a way for figure and ground to invert themselves, for the ambient to take material form and drift away, resettle at the curve of a line. Such lean lines turn Johnson’s sensory cinema into a sculpture that breaks apart upon reading, leaving images suspended and shifting. In these shapes we can see forklifts, animate roads, beings that are atomized or divided, that look like one thing but are made of something else. –The Editors and Poetry Staff

Joseph Johnson


Cold Smoke

Got outside by bits
Clenching the teeth

Stood in the sun
A lot, irately

To lift, forking
To take on anything

Above the lake
Trimmed flat with snow

The beneath-horizon
White trees, spiderwebs, ilk

Flagging a man down
Shake clouds, swirling

Deer around their beds
Flagging him down

With a hand
The road fussed, turned

White truck, feeding
Curling them long necks

Onto that long grass
Staying in twos