five poems

by Emma Johnson-Rivard

millennial poetic

i’m told it’s wrong for a woman to print the poetic

form, decadent and wrong. these are the bullshit

days of us, echo repetition of that time a preacher

stopped me on the street and said i was going to

hell. what a thing to say to a stranger. i was a

child then but i’m grown now and maybe if you,

royal, can pretend not to ask for much then it’s not

greed. there’s blistering everywhere a body can go,

every form of violence on offer. and that thing I

wrote was punishment. done in earnest, it made

a soul feel bad.

this is the sin today. i made somebody

feel bad because i didn’t smile and accept

a prescription of hell. anyway,

it’s bad for a woman to order these words,

worse for a lesbian. you should, i’ve been told,

strive in earnest to be less.

and look, one of the pleasures of this path

is we can take our life at its word, examine

the ruins with care. it’s a small thing to ask

for retrospection, for words to form the

scaffolding of the line. the fire line is burning,

the oceans choking on a plastic tang, but

in dawn, playing with a pen,

there could be a cat. there

could be a word on a page,

turned poetic.

this is a small thing to ask. still,

the irony is the same today. if you just

obey, i’m told, you will have safety. satan

is punished in the end. god wouldn’t allow

evil things to happen

(unless you, my darling, are

that evil thing)

this is the calculus now, impossible like

some kind of ouroboros documenting

perspective, words to noise, noise to

the line. the poem comes from my teeth,

damaged as they are. i cannot exist without

this shine. in my case, it’s based on some

kind of faith and

a degree of surrender. in other words,

the humility of the line becomes like a book

when brought to the sun. it must first open.

this is a dangerous proposition today. i have

already been accused of anger, of an unseemly

smile. but aside from moralizing and the old

illusion of control, november’s assumptions like

broken bones, it’s not the only lie. after all,

the machine is trapped in the system, too.

epidemic

scientists say there’s a new epidemic now,

the kind that takes no vaccine except

the time and kindness of your kind.

i’m told i must smile now. i must become

skilled at this.

the world’s gone corrosive, consequence

drifting back to the line. i was eleven

the first time i was catcalled. i said this

once and was told it’s hard to have

a rational conversation if you can’t

accept the world

(and we must all be

rational now).

when pressed, i’m told that i

must smile. this will reestablish

trust. 

that is false. someone loves the

propaganda now. someone talks

sweetly to it. i never will.

Era

Between moments of violence,

I live slight in comparison

formed by nature and nurture.

We were abandoned to our mantras.

You know, like a bomb.

extinction burst

we are still alive, i think, but

that story alone cannot stand

for the species.

this limits our goodbyes.

once lost, our words

will not return the same.

this holy language can

only ever evolve.

by definition, this

involves loss.

concerning souls, i

would like to borrow

from the poem i wrote

about my friend who died,

the ceremony of her passage,

cotton stuffed in her cheeks

so at least the shape

would remain.

we try, like grave markers,

to retain the memory but

survival remains.

a complicated beast. 

Film Studies

It was easy to understand a scene in cinema.

Framed spaces. People. These moments happen.

I was led back, enamored by writing—poetry,

living language, cinema mirrored on the page.

Hence, amalgamation as restraint.

The labor, the process, its many stages,

the finished product a language

composed of the world.

Photo of Emma Johnson-Rivard

BIO: Emma Johnson-Rivard is a doctoral student in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Coffin Bell, Red Flag Poetry, and others. She can be found at Bluesky at @blackcattales and at emmajohnson-rivard.com.