When it happens the rain
is not black but powder.
A noise bleeds from your ears
and everything quakes
alive inside you:
the circuits of the flowers
lighting up across a meadow,
the nanoglow
of a sea years from here
—:And like the flash
across an event horizon,
your thought disappears
:—and then the mind
threshed, and then the brain
a perfume of proto-pollen:
a microscopic cloud
radiating in a geranium
in the meadow of another country:
a powder the elk eat
in the sudden black rain.
Copyright © 2016 Sara Eliza Johnson. Used with permission of the author.