J †Johnson
25 Years Later You Are Gone
It was the end of any age
Or it was just the end of the 20th c
That year we tidied ourselves
& thought of Prince in the vegetable aisle
Like he planned all this ennui
Not so much I would die for you
Not take me with you or Darling Nikki
Only the sky all purple, people running
everywhere
I asked if there was anything you wanted
To read before the millennial turn
Time enough for Ulysses if we still care
Or maybe, you said, there are things to
leave behind
Medium Line
protect yr range
with friends lost thaw
line for death
ends here in the sun
melt gift chance
which is to say if we don’t
throw it in the pool
we’ll never find it later
Poetics 53
all writing
should be
of good
humor
which is
rigor
in drag
& out of
excuses
learned
on pain
of death
as in
any joke
whose
punchline
is
mortality
J †Johnson (JJ, they/them) is the author of Janky Materiality: Artifice & Interface (punctum books, 2026), The Book / Or / The Woods (punctum books, 2021), and Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (punctum books, 2018). JJ co-edits the horror poetics journal Cul-de-sac of Blood, is a staff writer at MovieJawn, and lives in Philadelphia.