Editor’s Note
While reading these poems, I was reminded of anthropologist David Graeber’s essay ‘What’s the point if we can’t have fun?’ The essay, which emphasizes the role of play in all of nature, discusses joy and fun as a driving principle, rather than stern calculations. As the language of these poems by Quinn Carver Johnson washed over me, I was thinking of how much work play does in these pieces. In the opening poem by Johnson, hope is described as ‘the thing with fins & scales / that flops & flounders’, swaying in the ‘tidebreeze’. It is the frolic built into the language of the poem that infuses it with buoyancy. In the second poem in this set, we are invited to perch beside the ‘bigfatbird’ exposed to the vagaries of the wind, mourning the loss of its ‘goodneststraw’. While there is much to enjoy and discover in this set, I was propelled ahead by the energy of the smashed-together words. By how these word-constructions worked at two levels: they not only expanded the semantic possibilities of the poems but also sparked purely sonic connections of joy.
—Carol Blaizy D’Souza
The Bombay Literary Magazine
after Emily Dickinson
Hope is the thing with fins & scales
that flops & flounders on the pier’s
reason-breaking planks
Hope is a school of fish that sways
like seaweed in the tidebreeze
but scatters at danger’s surfswell
Hope is a million silver minnows
schooling big enough to fill the ocean
small & elusive enough to slip
through your fingers.
Invisible in the wharf’s shade,
Hope can only be seen in the sunlight
We’re each individual
fish in the school, each of us
just a sliver, silver slicing
through the One Big Soul.
Hope is the thing that swims in the soul.
Hope is the thing that the soul swims in.
Sadsight this morning—
bigfatbird on my fencetop mouth full
of goodneststraw & the windblows
it away from him right in front of his woman
He chirps perplexed & pecks at air
The wind comes back & blows her away, too
The battery in my grandpa’s wristwatch dies
five years after he does. I still wear it
to work everyday. The links & joints creak
& moan, stretching &
shriveling with the weather. I can’t tell whether
the gold has chipped into silver or silver
chipped into gold. I can still smell
the sweet stench of lake water, fish.
There is so much left to clean, to fix.
Acknowledgements
Image credits: Willem Claeszoon Heda (~1593– 1682). A Still life with a silver goblet and a watch on a pewter plate (1941). Material: Oil on panel. Dimensions: 40 x 29.5 cm. Collection Pieter C.W.M. Dreesmann, London. Image courtesy: Bijl- Van Urk Gallery.
Master Willem Claez. Heda was the sort of Dutch Golden Age painter who could make Nature look like a shabby knockoff artist. His apples were more apple-y than real apples, his pewter plates more pewter-y than ever possible in Physics and his watches–he seems to have liked painting watches–ticked sterner time than old Chronos himself.
Of course he had help. It is the nature of representations, especially when seen in the light of memory, to be truer than the real. Which perhaps is (also) what Quinn Carver Johnson’s final poem seemed to be getting at.
Author | Quinn Carver Johnson
Quinn Carver Johnson (they/them) is a poet, printmaker, & collage artist from Tulsa, Oklahoma. They are the author of The Perfect Bastard (Curbstone Books, 2023), winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Poetry. Their work has also appeared in World Literature Today, Rappahannock Review, Right Hand Pointing, Cimarron Review, Red Earth Review, and elsewhere and was featured on The Slowdown podcast hosted by Major Jackson. [Source: Author’s text]
