Johanna Tollefson
Johanna Tollefson is writer of non-fiction and poetry and is almost finished with an MFA from Minnesota State University where she is the poetry editor for Blue Earth Review. From the Pacific Northwest, she is getting used to the mountain-less sky and miles of corn of the Midwest. She hopes to find all the poetry she can while she’s stationed in the tall stalks of Minnesota.
I think I am a moth—
or a long list of titles. Always the promise of somethingbut never the getting. Never the ending.The doorway but not the room.
The way I ache for things is like hope, but an absencedoesn’t guarantee a returning, nor a chrysalis a bright thing- only waiting.
Call me iridescent but make my wakeful hour midnight. Show me the moon and a place to hidefrom it. Put my name on your lips
and leave it there for three days. I am the haunted bark of aspen, the decoy eyes of a snake in the slow unfoldingof wings. I am not a flame.
The way I ache for things is like hope, but an absencedoesn’t guarantee a returning, nor a chrysalis a bright thing- only waiting.
Call me iridescent but make my wakeful hour midnight. Show me the moon and a place to hidefrom it. Put my name on your lips
and leave it there for three days. I am the haunted bark of aspen, the decoy eyes of a snake in the slow unfoldingof wings. I am not a flame.