How to Be Eaten by a Lion. Michael Johnson

yourself to the ground, made numb

      by those eyes. It may be easier just to watch,

      for fighting will only prolong things,

      and you will have no time to notice the sky,

      the texture of dust, what incredible leaves

      the trees have. Instead, focus on your life,

      its crimson liquor he grows drunk on.

      Notice the way the red highlights his face,

      how the snub nose is softened, the lips made fuller.

      Notice his deft musculature, his rapture,

      because in all of creation there is not art

      to compare with such elegance, such simplicity.

      Notice this and remember it,

      this way in which you became beautiful

      when you thought there was nothing more.

      Bone Lullabies

      Everything that comes here to feed dies.

      Mazuku, the tribes say. Evil wind.

      Volcanic air gone glacial through dried creekbeds,

      stoking the flora to life, drawing the grazers.

      Gazelle and kudu racks bedeck the turreted anthills

      like underlings for the elephant pharaohs.

      Why here? Perhaps this was the way to die:

      drawn by green in an otherwise wilderness,

      following the guideposts of your family’s bones.

      You’d follow swifts snapping the dusk down,

      bequeathing evening to night.

      The stars might seem a paradise descending,

      birdcage blueprints for the rungs of your torso,

      each rib sunned and razed, your breaths housed there

      so that as you rest your marrow rocks the beasts to bed.

      The soil springs the veined calligraphy of leaves.

      The birds dine on the ripe fruits of your eyes,

      perched on your carriage staves, flapping

      their prayers in the dust to eventide songs

      that roam your bones long after sleep has come.

      Rockhound

      Across the quarries stone rose as if spooked

      from a nest, percussive across the tailing ponds.

      Shrapnel on the well-house tin carried a fume

      from the opened marrow of a stone,

      essence akin to that buzz-build before a sneeze.

      Among the clades, the topazes and Jacobins,

      hermits, mangoes, coquettes, brilliants,