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[ 2 poems from Issue 97 of Pedestal ]
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To Rest Here
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in the museum of my children
smooth the comforter
curl up and be the child
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adhesive streaks on the ceiling
the last of the glow-in-the-
dark planets
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I rest between the old
globe and the stuffed closet
the hoard of their natural history
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tiny sweaters with buttons of bone
primitive sculptures
I hold onto these I still hold
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their small weight
sweet sticky hands
in my hair
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when I circled them and
absorbed their light
when I was their moon
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Marilyn A. Johnson
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❀ ❀ ❀
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As if it weren’t enough to bear
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the world’s dark cloak, the inhumanity
of man which knows no limit,
30-foot high flash-flooded rivers, the charred
acres lit by wind and lightning or cigarette butts
cheerfully tossed out speeding car windows
at midnight, we can’t escape our own
shallow thinking: who has wretched taste
in evening wear, or too many tattoos,
who exudes the rank smell of weed through
his pores in the 9-item quick line. Jesus, it’s bad.
Worth masking up again even if you aren’t afraid
of Covid or SARS the way you should be.
Managing so many large and small disasters
while newly on a budget and nervous about keeping
your job, or Medicaid, or Social Security,
and the chemo has ruined the nerves in your feet
so you keep falling in strange places for no reason.
Fuck. And then Gaza, and Sudan, and ICE picking
off people who aren’t white enough to live
in this country or at all according to the spiteful
rich bastards in charge this week. I am so furious,
and sorry, and don’t think writing poetry
does much good unless you accidentally hit
the bulls-eye sweet spot of something obvious
but deep that has never been said, or not recently,
not in today’s language, somehow blending
hope and humor in a salve to smear over
this seeping wound we all have. A little respite.
Other than that it’s just line after line
of ordinary frustration. And now we’re all sitting
around on a Friday morning in July and I just turned
70, the coming of age of everyone who’s ever
been elderly. I mean, really, what the fuck?!
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Molly Fisk
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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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The wound we all have: seeping, obvious, choking the room with stink; or cloaked, penetrating, a stone or a shackle. When nothing makes sense what’s left but to rage and wail? When there is no recovering sense from the senselessness, what’s left but to smooth the comforter and curl up in the past, comfortless though it may prove to be?
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These two poems snagged me at one particular morning’s perigee and swung me in circles, up and around and back again. There’s already too much evil in life to add more to it with some compulsion to feel guilty when a smidge of joy seeps in. There’s too much of life – life gone by and life circling around right now and maybe just maybe more life tomorrow – to chuck joy out the window entirely. Impermanence . . . suffering . . . joy, damn it! No rationalization requested, no forgiveness sought as I reach the last line with a silly grin on my face and shout to life, “Really, what the fuck!”
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❀
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These two poem are among many other saviors of sanity in Issue 97 of Pedestal. After twenty-five years of continuous publication, this is the final issue. John Amen founded Pedestal and is its managing editor, assisted by poetry editors Arlene Ang, melissa christine goodrum, Stefan Lovasik, Michael Spring, Susan Terris and the hundreds and thousands of writers who have submitted poetry and book reviews over the years. Thank you, Gang. And thank you for alerting us that although Pedestal will not be publishing new editions you will be maintaining back issues online indefinitely.
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Marilyn A. Johnson (marilynjohnson.net) lives with her family in New York’s Hudson Valley. recent poetry can be read online in UCity Review, Plume, and the Provincetown Journal. Her three non-fiction books include The Dead Beat, about obituary writers; This Book Is Overdue, about librarians and archivists in the digital age; and Lives in Ruins, about contemporary archaeologists.
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Molly Fisk (mollyfisk.com) lives in California’s Sierra foothills. She edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Molly’s publications include The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary. Her new collection, Walking Wheel, arrives in April from Red Hen Press. She
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