Copyright © 2017 Jenny Johnson
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Johnson, Jenny, 1979- author.
Title: In full velvet / Jenny Johnson.
Description: Louisville, KY : Sarabande Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016014117 (print) | LCCN 2016027029 (ebook) | ISBN 9781941411377 (hardback) | ISBN 9781941411384
Subjects: | BISAC: NATURE / Ecology. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory.
Classification: LCC PS3610.O3564 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PS3610.O3564 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014117
Interior and exterior design by Kristen Radtke.
Manufactured in Canada.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Contents
2 Summoning the Body That Is Mine When I Shut My Eyes
3 Tail
5 The Bus Ride
6 In the Dream
7 Severe
8 Elegy at Twice the Speed of Sound
9 Dorothy’s Trash:
10 There Are New Worlds
11 Altitudes
2
1 Souvenirs
2 Eagle Lake
3 Pine Street Barbershop
4 Gay Marriage Poem
5 Folsom Street Fairytale
6 Ladies’ Arm Wrestling Match at the Blue Moon Diner
7 Little Apophat
8 Fish Out of Water
9 Spaces
10 Vigil
11 Desire among Sparrows
12 James River
13 Victory
14 Aria
15 Late Bloom
Notes
Acknowledgments
1
Dappled Things
Thank you day for dappled things—
For ambrosia beetles streaking skylines inside a maple
For pansies speckled as a painter’s sleeve
For russet-crusted sidewalks of lichen, airy springs
of fiery-structured fringe For pink corpuscles
making midges soon to burst out the undersides of leaves
Thank you for all that’s still somehow
counter, original, spare, and strange
For the brightening swell of a honeybee’s sting
For the alien markings on my girlfriend’s cheek and how
they form a perfect triangle
Thank you for the risen stars on the skin of an apple,
which I slice into fine, thin crescents
For dapple is a word derived from apple
and apple once meant any fruit at all
born from a tree: lemon, fig, persimmon
Thank you road apple, finger apple, earth apple
for all that apple was before apple acquired
a stigma for being forbidden—
Marked, dappled, shadowed grappling,
stamped juice, controlled smudging of
what twinkles unthinkably
And because I’m minion this morning to gay old music
Thanks Gentle Hop for this this-ness, for teaching attention
How to mark hard word-bodies with stress,
acute glyphs, blue scores For reckoning the risks
in discipline’s rod—between sheets of loose-leafed linen—
You knew few might hear your coded address
Do I look hard enough to receive?
I am not moved by God, but I am moved by this
To experience the largesse: What you look hard at seems
to look hard at you O to be marked reciprocally, yes please
Across, above, below and with
I kiss my hand to male bonobos making out in public
in spite of Western science
trying to explain away The glorious kink
of spinner dolphins’ whistle-clicks
over-under rolling, belly-on-belly clasping by the soft tips
of flukes, riding dorsal rudders to the brink
I am inspired, call my girlfriend, say: Won’t you be my Olympic marmot
chewing on my ear till I lift my tail?
My black-billed magpie babble-singing