Vapor
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.
“I have been fascinated lately by all the ways the world could end, and particularly the precise moment of an apocalyptic cataclysm: the asteroid hitting the ocean, the supervolcano’s pyroclastic flow. While writing this poem, I was thinking about the moment of nuclear annihilation, when the body vaporizes, its matter and person (seemingly) instantaneously transformed. But into what? I suppose in that way it is another poem about where we go when we die—not only as individuals, but as a species.”
—Sara Eliza Johnson
Sara Eliza Johnson
