J †Johnson
The Passage / The Thing
The ball comes back down the stair.
You might have thrown it over the
rail in another town, on another
planet years ago, & here it is in your
hand. It’s no use. Memories show us
how we were already haunted.
Nobody watches anything for the
1st time. We know it’s been around
& has come back for us. The late
plague only revealed what we
already knew : those actors are years
older by the time we see them.
As for the cane chair in the attic,
leave that thing alone.
Behind the house is nothing, &
behind that is a ridge, & behind that
is a word, only we won’t ever know
it, though we remember almost
everything else, including the smell
of the halls, & the stairwell in the far
building, & the despair of our
parents. This is not to say they were
wrong in caring for us, or had
thrown away their lives, but this was
a west coast afterslumber, when we
should have known better, & did.
The Passage / The Thing
The mall painting was so bad she
must be possessed. Nevermind she
sent a person hovering over the
communal statuary. Nevermind the
situation at home. No 1 glaring
through the window would have
known anything wasn’t wrong.
Camp was a way to acknowledge
what had yet to have already gone
wrong. Left of left of the dial was the
far right again—any cul-de-sac child
knows this tale. The TV worked both
ways, as we learned for sure later on
when it became obvious The
Twilight Zone was watching us
as well.
I don’t know what poetry is anymore
you said. In your way you were right.
The lamp turned itself on. Poetry, of
course, couldn’t give 2 shits.
So we watch post-millennial sitcoms
—Nashville, The O.C.—for what
they aren’t, as though there were 1
episode per week. We are neither
there nor there. Anyway those
shows are always the same.
Go back to the shelf behind our
house. It dropped off. We tried to
jump it to our dismay. The sour
grass was ridiculous. Just
everywhere. While reptiles ran our
days. A back wall revealed
kumquats & this was where grandma
died. Mounds at every fence. Once
a year it rained.
The Passage / The Thing
The sailor without a ship tip-toes
along the pier on the way through
the carousel lobby where the
beatnik & fortune teller stop him for
tea while his mind is on the
mermaid so he doesn’t hear their
warnings. He’ll find her in a
sepulcher combing her hair, & he’ll
see the pickled captain’s hand in a
jar. Everybody warns the sailor
about the wrong thing, as though
they know he’ll make it through
anyway because this is film noir &
only the female lead won’t survive.
Which is not to say it isn’t worth the
ride. But we’d like to see the tail
end of the film be less trite.
Either the thing should not be here
or we should not exist, & the other
way as well. Our ultimatum is worn
out from misuse, but we had no
choice. It simply could not account
for the area between here & there,
this & that plus all the others. There
is always a 3rd channel, another
passage which opens to all others.
Easy to overlook from the
threshold’s false premise of 1 room
or the other, in or out, coming or
going. But there are not 2 rooms, or
even 1 room & another. There is
only the passage, which leads to all
things : what is & is not, &
something else.
J †Johnson is the author of Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (punctum books, 2018), and a poetry collection, The Book / Or / The Woods (punctum books, 2021). Their writing has appeared in PEN America, Jacket2, Encyclopedia Vol. 3, Tarpaulin Sky, Sink Review, and elsewhere. A chapbook, trunc & frag, is at Our Teeth. They wrote the music and culture series Book Album Book at Fanzine, and is at work on a performative critical investigation of analog-digital interface, language-oriented poetry, digital language art, and experimental electronic music called Janky Materiality. They live in Philadelphia.