Through the plastic latticework
the yard looked checkered.
Dylan was on the radio singing
about drawing crazy patterns
on the sheets. She was in the kitchen.

I couldn't help but marvel that it all
fit together: his gravel voice
and the slow melody bouncing over
the strum; the gaps between the grass,
and her inside cooking breakfast,
the pop and sizzle of butter on a skillet.

It had been over a year, and she
was still there, knew there
were no patterns on my sheets.
It must have been the end of something
young, to be on the balcony and love
not wanting, just sitting close
to the sound of her as it floated
through the screen door.

I was watching the grass grow
and filling in the blanks between
patches of green, knowing what
I couldn't see would still be there,
while Dylan was on the radio singing
Strike another match, go start anew,
and it's all over now, Baby Blue.

________________________________________________________________________________________________

A Pysanka for My Mother's Poetry Book
By Luke Johnson

It kept the table steady, her marbled
notebook filled with poems.
The pages go blank a few months
after I was born, when the uneven
dining room table needed righting.
I remember watching her hold
her kistka over the candle there, letting
it melt words I could not then comprehend
onto the egg surface. She would tell me

what the written-wax meant: why it was
called a pysanka, from the Ukranian pysaty
meaning "to write", she said, and then
what the symbols stood for, why the art
mattered. But I wasn't listening.
I was too compelled by the dyeing process--
liked lowering the eggs into mason jars
full of candlelight, watching the oval
shadows descend into wombs
of color that would leave their stain.
She used a wooden spoon to scoop
the eggs out without cracking them,
the curved wood of its half-bottom
held every one of my mother's shades
until it was black, couldn't hold any more,
just glistened as it came out the jar mouth.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Ninilchik Town Meeting
By Luke Johnson

The tinderbox gymnasium leaned in.
It was night but the sun was up.
The ranger was talking about the roots
of the black spruce, like kindling, like gasoline on a stick.

The town's faces were growing
out of the walls. Single mothers,
ashen, asked about rotting foundations
and soggy wood. Old-timers deep into
the top bleacher puffed up over
propane tanks they had left behind.
Alaska Girls Basketball
State Champion banners
loomed in the half-dark shadows
like engorged aspen trunks, swaying
above the overgrown faces.
Natives were knots in the wood.
They needed someone to tell them
if their homes would burn.

The Caribou Hills fire was up to fifty
thousand acres, started by sparks
from a grind-wheel, the ranger reported,
his small voice soft as muskeg.
A basketball bounced in the hallway.

A little girl with yarrow hair trapped between
her mother's knees and the pressed stillness of the gym,
turned her head. She caught sight of a man
in the entryway, then shot like a pebble from a campfire.
The faces followed her down court, watched her
cram her head into the bib of her father's overalls
while he looked back at the faces, the wooden stare.

Luke Johnson is a writer from Ithaca, NY currently studying in the MFA program at Hollins University. He has a sheepdog named Laddie, and a beard named Frank. They often disagree. This is his first publication.