Peter Johnson

Peter Johnson Poems

Peter Johnson Biography

Peter Johnson (b. 1951 Buffalo, New York) is an American poet, and novelist. He received his B.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of New Hampshire. His poems and fiction have appeared in Field, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Quarterly West, North Dakota Quarterly, The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry, and Beloit Fiction Journal. Johnson is the founder and editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, and the editor of The Best of The Prose Poem: An International Journal (White Pine Press, 2000). He is contributing editor to American Poetry Review, Web del Sol, and Slope, and teaches creative writing and children's literature at Providence College, Rhode Island, where he lives with his wife, Genevieve, and two sons, Kurt and Lucas.)

The Best Poem Of Peter Johnson

Just Listen

I sit by the window and watch a great mythological bird go down in flames. In fact, it's a kite the neighborhood troublemaker has set on fire. Twenty-one and still living at home, deciding when to cut through a screen and chop us into little pieces. "He wouldn't hurt a fly," his mother would say, as they packed our parts into black antiseptic body bags. I explain this possibility to the garbage men. I'm trying to make friends with them, unable to understand why they leave our empty cans in the middle of the driveway, then laugh as they walk away. One says, "Another name for moving air is wind, and shade is just a very large shadow"—perhaps a nice way to make me feel less eclipsed. It's not working, it's not working. I'm scared for children yet to be abducted, scared for the pregnant woman raped at knife point on the New Jersey Turnpike, scared for what violence does to one's life, how it squats inside the hollow heart like a dead cricket. My son and his friends found a dead cricket, coffined it in a plastic Easter egg and buried it in the backyard. It was a kind of time capsule, they explained—a surprise for some future boy archeologist, someone much happier than us, who will live during a time when trees don't look so depressed, and birds and dogs don't chatter and growl like the chorus in an undiscovered Greek tragedy.

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