Oh, Fascinating by Anya Johnson

I make of myself an island on a sea of other people’s lives.

Oh, Fascinating

by Anya Johnson

I am shaking the fruit loops onto the bed.
I am reading a hastily annotated To the Lighthouse
intending to finish. I am Friday nighting

which means I am listening at the window
and running a bath. Outside, everyone is screaming
on their way to the bar. 

Whoever read this book before me wrote what?! 
in all the margins—I text a photo to my uncle 

who had been similarly mystified; in turn, 
he sends me a eulogy to edit for his friend 
who hung himself last Wednesday. 

In a postscript, he explains, “Amongst isn’t used correctly,
I think, but I don’t want to say despite or bound by…”

The pipes make a sound like a cosmic bowling alley.
Between the bath and the book, I make of myself 
an island on a sea of other people’s lives.

I read up to when Mr. Ramsay stalls on Q, 
the same passage that infuriated my uncle.
“Is he a dumbass?” is scrawled at the bottom of the page—

it’s like falling through a fishing hole into someone else’s brain!
Or having one foot in a rowboat moving definitely away from shore!

I realize the bath is a conduit and not an island or
the island is both a conduit and a private party.
This is what they mean when they say collective consciousness. 

I edit the eulogy.
I leave amongst alone.

That night, my dreams are like a long scene from a Kurosawa film
in which two samurai gallop from one end of the frame
to the other in a dense mist, never quite vanishing.

In the movie, just before the galloping scene, 
the samurai meet the white spirit. She delivers the prophecy;
a procession of men form and unravel. 

There are multiple timelines going at once. 
Everything gets muddled—laughter leaks in through the window,
I can’t find my horse, my email, my lighthouse. 

Strange is the world, the spirit howls, laughing.  
She is either turning a small wheel with a stick
or knitting an endless stocking for the newly dead.
She seems to be saying, life is a tale told by an idiot, etc. 

I think my uncle was talking about, or amongst, 
the freedom of knowing almost nothing.

In the end everyone suffered and then died—
in the book, in the movie, in the eulogy. 

The spirit said:

Oh, 
Fascinating.

Anya Johnson is our ONLY POEMS Bob Hicok Fellow 2026.