Sonja Johanson
This Was the Hops Field
Found poem, source text H.L. Davis’s “Honey in the Horn”
There was no wind,
there were no birds.
Their breath was soundless
as a homestead-claim
in a stretch of empty sky.
Disgrace came off all those places,
traced high and frost-white
with a wet, black pencil -
full of contrition and damp promises.
~
Wondering at Himself
Found poem, source text H.L. Davis’s “Honey in the Horn”
A man's true sentiments
show up every spring.
He finds himself
deviling a hawk,
having fun wrong
way to the wind.
Feeling old and kind
of childish, he puts
patent medicine away
for a game of shinny.
He lays the ravished
looking glass flat.
Why should such a flow
of spirits run to waste?
~
Sonja Johanson has recent work appearing in the Best American Poetry blog, BOAAT, Epiphany, and The Writer’s Almanac. She is a contributing editor at the Eastern Iowa Review, and the author of Impossible Dovetail (IDES, Silver Birch Press), all those ragged scars (Choose the Sword Press), and Trees in Our Dooryards (Redbird Chapbooks). Sonja divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine.
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