Vapor by Sara Eliza Johnson

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend February 24, 2016   Vapor   Sara Eliza Johnson

When it happens the rain is not black but powder.   A noise bleeds from your ears and everything quakes   alive inside you: the circuits of the flowers   lighting up across a meadow, the nanoglow   of a sea years from here               —:And like the flash   across an event horizon, your thought disappears   :—and then the mind threshed, and then the brain   a perfume of proto-pollen: a microscopic cloud   radiating in a geranium in the meadow of another country:   a powder the elk eat in the sudden black rain.            Copyright © 2016 Sara Eliza Johnson. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “I have been fascinated lately by all the ways the world could end, and particularly the precise moment of an apocalyptic cataclysm: the asteroid hitting the ocean, the supervolcano’s pyroclastic flow. While writing this poem, I was thinking about the moment of nuclear annihilation, when the body vaporizes, its matter and person (seemingly) instantaneously transformed. But into what? I suppose in that way it is another poem about where we go when we die—not only as individuals, but as a species.” —Sara Eliza Johnson   Sara Eliza Johnson is the author of Bone Map (Milkweed Editions, 2014). She is a second-year poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.         Poetry by Johnson   Bone Map (Milkweed Editions, 2014) "Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich "Swimming" by Carl Phillips "Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City" by Jennifer Grotz Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038