We’re all a series of gestures:
the universe and the body.
The psychic tells me I’ve lived
many lives on many planets.
In this life, I learn to pluck
my father’s fiberglass laugh
from muscle memory.
She says I have tension in my
solar plexus, where the heart is.
In this life, he left a voicemail,
an empty cicada shell
once cradling a body.
Her deck spills the star card,
He says it’s okay to let go.
In this life, I bite the inside of my cheek,
the sore growing, gaping
each time I speak.
Fathers are fissures,
a backwards glance,
checkered gaps,
caught between
almost present.
Airea Johnson is enchanted with the grief process, the idea of significance, and the freewill dilemma. In another life she was probably Bieber’s “One Less Lonely Girl”, but in this life, she creates playlists and listens to her cat wail.
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