John C. Morrison

 
Lost Poem

The title is lost, so we can’t find the poem where an old farm road curves below a row of eucalyptus between two golden hills. It’s okay to cry. The road travels on to a fishing village on a small bay with pelicans about their aerial antics. In the village a young woman knows her parents will die and how demons taunt the hungry with ripe figs. When she whispers, farewell forever, she means, love me inside the walls of the garden. The poem ignores dreams and the pages of old journals. In the first version, you fall asleep in an olive grove and wake in a hush as the moon rises. In the second, you live beside the bay with your very first lover when an earthquake snaps the road like a dry chocolate cookie and swallows the village.

Pandemic Yeast

Grains almost gold in color
when no one cared about gold.
Heidi, our down-the-street neighbor,

spared a quarter-cup in a cold
jar she left on the front porch.
I’m still thankful to her, her household,

the way I’m grateful to the white birch
and all the trees I’ve come to know
by name and shade. In one splurge

I baked a batch of cinnamon rolls
with all the yeast, a doughy
highest and best use or so

our son texted in a thank you he
sent from a break at work. He’d become
essential, untouchable, and we

didn’t know if forever. Our son
slept below ground in the basement,
rose as we waved and walked away.
 

John C. Morrison leads poetry discussion groups for Soapstone, teaches as an Associate Fellow for the Attic Institute, and is also an editor for Comstock Review. His most recent book is Monkey Island (redbat books), and his work has appeared in journals such as Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, and Rhino.

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