CAITLIN JOHNSON
Mugshot of Assata Shakur, April 1971

I love the way this mugshot fails
to capture any part of you
that matters—no smile, eyes
as if nothing, chin up straight
and zero fucks uncovered
by the clamoring flash
that claps over you again, again.
I love the way this mugshot fails
to touch you at all—free despite
the State’s say-so, despite
the numinous omen of bad
metal, despite the warrant
of unending cruelty—free to go
anywhere, anywhere but home.

At the open house the realtor called it a bonus room. Scuffed hardwood floors, dusty crown molding, olive walls and no closet. It seemed appropriate. The listing suggested an office. The realtor suggested a fitness room. A nursery. The two of us will never have children, we decided early on. The night we received the apartment’s keys we were eager to use them, like coins clasped tight in our hands, carefully pocketed as we entered. Neither carried the other inside. He brought taper candles for the windowsills, twin glasses, a bottle of something we could both drink. We walked from room to room, imagining transformations. His teal floral runner in the hall. My museum postcards framed and hung beside the kitchen window. For the bonus room I chose an old mobile from a cardboard box of ornaments I’d brought—ascending angels spiraling around an incandescent bulb turned star, each seraph laden with a horn. I hung it from an old and painted-over hook in the ceiling so we were surrounded by shadows of heavenly heralds, pronouncing us home. We sat under one of the curtainless windows and he poured a drink for each of us. As the mobile spun in that near-empty dim, the seraphs stretched, spreading feathered wings to the ceiling, our skin, gracing the space. Looking at him, I was afraid. Would he see me better in this light we now shared? Would he give the distance between us Your name? Later, when the room became an office, I took the mobile down and brought it back to my parents’ house. Or I put it into storage. Or I donated it. Still, in this room that will never be a nursery, I remember that sublime fear of being seen loving You and having nowhere to hide.

She sings the song of the angel holding her own 
halo in her hands. Or, girl 
 
on her way to school.
Or lady waiting for a bus. Or 
 
the mother found with her daughter under 
the rubble a couple days after the— 
 
Ballerina on her knees 
in a field. Or 
 
Joan of Arc, in perfumed flames.
Or the stone bride 
in the cemetery, wearing 
a veil of moss 
& lichen. 
And 
the blindfolded child 
bride. And the nurse 
 
who attended to the raped.
And the teacher who shielded the children.
And the vixen who ran into the thorns to lead 
the hunters away from—
 
And the eyes of the virgin 
saint on a plate. And 
the ewe, submitting 
to the shears. And, baring 
her neck, the queen. And 
 
the prostitute strangled in the parking lot. 
And the wives holding hands on the beach, shot.
 
Marilyn Monroe on a sewer grate.
Jane Doe in a drawer at the morgue.
 
Like Bonnie, riding shotgun. Or any 
song ever sung by Amy 
 
Winehouse, who lived & died for us.

after John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia”

In the Tate, before we are married, before
the days you are moored in our bed, I enter 
another gallery, each painting a window 
to another world. The crowd streams around
 
the room, a steady flow across the art
stacked on each wall. But I am snagged
at Millais: the gnarled log jutting out over
the river, a flower crown floating a ways below
 
its intended head, and the bed of moss cradling
Ophelia in a wet, soft stasis. I love this one, you
say, drifting beside me. My favorite play, too. 
I do not know whether she’s held there gently, 
 
the moss keeping her cool and still, or if the river
will soon carry her off, first behind large reeds
primed to hide her pale face before, at last,
she arrives at the point of her own discovery,
 
eventually pulled from the river, dried, and buried.
But the biggest questions are her hands, upturned
toward the sky, and the flowers that seem to spill
from her grip in slow succession. For whom
 
were you braiding the crown, Ophelia, if not
yourself? And what is it your hands drift toward?
Some days, I look out on the water and think
I see your phantom face reflected on smooth
 
stones, your auburn hair in a tangle of bowing
branches, the dim glow of your dress beneath
fallen petals. Some days, a line will flash in my head:
The grave’s a fine and private place… / But none…

Some days, I wake first; I roll over and embrace
you like a bed of soft moss, careful not to wake
you. I slide my hand in yours, curling my fingers 
around your upturned palms. We stay like this
 
until the alarm rings us to the next doctor. I rest 
my head on your chest, listen to the slow murmur 
of rivers coursing through you, and squeeze a little 
tighter to keep you from being carried away.

her eyes broken & / singing / the way birds sing / as they mourn in the / night pale skin pulled taut / over the same / old / skeleton her / lips locked / in place sliver of throat / rivers of hair receding / into the vast fabric / of darkness the / black oaks / shrouding her cold / embrace cradles / me softly / so softly hands bloody / & sleepy so / sleepy / tired of waiting / hold / me hold / me / the way birds / feed their young / with the slag of / worms drowned / & lifted / as children in / heavy rain the sky / aching as a mother / aching / the moment the skull / empties itself back / into the earth that / feeble animal called  a soul retreating / into these little / hands stretching towards the light / for the very first / time to wake anew / & sleep again / to listen close to the song / of bones the song / of sacrifice / for the very last / time to wake anew / & sleep / again eyes veiled / in snow birds migrating / back & / forth rocked back / & forth into the night / tired / & alive / the sanctifying beast of death / swallows her / back & / forth into the black / forest where / everything / fades / as ash breath / body / blood / & we were / one / & i am one.

after Charles Sprague Pearce's Sante Genevieve

Believe half at most. I don’t 
mean the miracles—take the impossible 
at its word. But beware the gentle myths. 
Men christen saints in retrospect, 
bestow halos in hindsight. 

Revision renders my youth pastoral,
unfettered, ruddy with adoration. 
But farmers’ daughters were made 
for another veil and vow, for a dress 
stained with man’s seed, leaking his fruit. 

A daughter’s cross: to bear and bear until 
she can bear no more. The Lord’s commands 
can damn a woman. Generations call me 
blessed, but the world has other names 
for girls who hear from God. 

All divine whispers yield a curse. 
Carry God’s child, and you are a whore. 
Carry no one’s child, and you are no one.
Scribes cannot taste the stale sneer’s 
venom, how it clouds holy dreams. 

So my wildest truth remains
untold—that yearning plagued me 
beyond words or womb, that when I shut 
my eyes, the angel’s gaze held 
and overshadowed everything.

after Van Gogh’s Rain

Neither lucernes nor sunflowers in Gogh’s Rain, 
               only petrichor’s call unsheathing the leaves— 
                            wheat fields bent in full genuflection,
                                         forging a new religion from the empyrean.

She hails from the floodgates, feather-light,
               falling with the feral grace of a harbinger.
                            Have you seen anything greater than this— 
                                        a force fluent in the heft of her power?

See how the sky yawns in adulation,
              thunder throbbing in heaven’s throat,
                            & crows cowering at the rain’s refrain, 
                                        racing toward Earth like bullets to bodies,

pattering like pigment on a painter’s palette.
              Gogh’s easel, too, was an ark; each brushstroke,
                           another rescued beast, each brushstroke—
                                         another oleander mistaken for an olive. 

& in the beginning was God grieving His creation: 
              sons of Adam raising alabaster altars to themselves—
                            bronze gods garmented with God’s stolen glory,
                                         until His wrath unlatched the world’s first deluge.

& there was rain, & there was ruin—
	     a tumult of human hands knuckling Noah’s ark,
                           & Noah asking God: Will your mercy marinate
                                        these hands hemorrhaging beyond my ark?

& the earth drank deep like Gogh’s fields 
             drunk on heaven’s white wine—
                           grasses gurgling gospel,
                                         paintbrushes bleeding blue belief.

Neither sunflowers nor lucernes in Gogh’s Rain, 
             but heaven unbuttoning her silver seeds again—
                          wheat fields fenestrated by the first flood, 
                                        the sodden gospel of a world reborn drowned.

after The Adoration of Shepherds - Giorgione 

          “Ultramarine blue is a colour illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all
            other colours; one could not say anything about it or do anything with it, that its
            quality would not still surpass.” — Cennini

when
divinity does not lie
in oiled folds
of skin or angelled
babies hovering, and
does not sink
in the distance or
the hills biting
back horizons—what’s biblical
but the blues? that have been
laced with arsenic? that can
pull a heart out
through a stomach? so rich
they reek
of home and
make sailors sick
for it? what is left
after learning
what it means
to leave? what use
is worship when
seeing hurts twice
as badly as never
having seen?

In his mind's eye there was no room for background, her dress on the floor,
or a dumb fruit bowl her hand dipped into, nothing

but Akhmatova's cosmic geometry. He took in each curve and shadow of her
body to the point that within her light he saw an entire world—свет within
светлый, world within light.

It's as if he kissed the glistening mouth of those galaxies and knocked them
back until they were all he knew. Drunk, euphoric artist. Just like god

must be asleep in his recliner, dreaming of us coiling like a twist of citrus in
his midnight drink.

Only in a painting could a woman be this free.
Even with the eyes of a man drinking her and his hands shaping her,
she uses death as an armrest, and bares her smooth, pale chest,
fearless of any stabs.
Lips bruised green, fingers bruised blue,
she has had enough.

Today she will uncrease her brow and push anguish,
the alleged child of god,
out of her swollen belly.

She gives in to angel-song
eyes empty as the sea,
thirstless and unquenched
hungerless and hungering
hearing unheard song in the shadow above.

She knows how they call her 'whore' because of the gentle fire of her hair
But they are merely jealous.

He hid the blood on his hands in the folds of her gown
It was perfect.

                           Romare Bearden, Tomorrow I May Be Far Away


The word collage comes from the French coller,
          to glue. Sticking together is what 
we do, exiles assembling ourselves in different 

cities, pasting the private history of me 
          into the broad story of you: migration 
North from dirt yard & wash tub, always the need 

for bare feet on packed earth, aching 
          to go forth from rural South, though impossible 
once and for all to leave it, high seat 

of the imagination, knowing what hands remain 
          in the window, the moon-shaped nails, a face
with one eye looming, the other turning

inward. One reason for the imagination is 
          worship, to conjure into being the beings not 
here. Your art is ruthless, Romare. May I call you 

that? You’ve rendered us so perfectly, dreamers 
          waiting on money for ghost railroads, 
for rooms in tenements to open, for traveling 

clothes and a decent pair of shoes. To be old 
          enough or brave. To escape with the scraps 
we have. To save the blue shirt evidence 

of sunlight, net of crow & fence. One foot out 
          and one foot in, pieces stuck in competing 
patterns: a far-seeing, forlorn hint of sky-

scraper making the shape of your nose. 
          Slipping on its echoes. God! It’s all that 
waiting. If we could put on the blackbird wing’s 

red epaulets, we’d fly away and be at rest
          from all the longing that lets light dapple us.
The woman reaching through the window is always 

trying to hold us, trying to hold us back. 

after Kelly McCormack

From above, the body is nothing
but a pool of silk. I have tried—
being a body, having one—
but my hand pierced my abdomen
until I was holding myself at a new
hinge. Hollow, then. Still, I throw
light as a suggestion of desire. At dinner,
a man’s hand curls over my shoulder
to name what he sees mirage
& meal. I have only ever ached
to be emptied—to quench nothing
but the most desperate thirst.
Out of obligation, I have pressed my chest
along a lover’s & waited for her hands,
two flushed wings, to puncture my spine.
If I long to be outside myself,
it is only to rest the image: bed & absence.
Identity offers nothing material—renunciation
sits tender in my mouth but sweetens
no other taste. Again, bed. Again,
only the open window & the light
hitting glass—bright & ready for capture.