In Full Velvet. Jenny Johnson

      This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

      Contents

        Title Page

        Copyright

       1

      1  Dappled Things

      2  Summoning the Body That Is Mine When I Shut My Eyes

      3  Tail

      4  In Full Velvet

      5  The Bus Ride

      6  In the Dream

      7  Severe

      8  Elegy at Twice the Speed of Sound

      9  Dorothy’s Trash:

      10  There Are New Worlds

      11  Altitudes

       2

      1  Souvenirs

      2  Eagle Lake

      3  Pine Street Barbershop

      4  Gay Marriage Poem

      5  Folsom Street Fairytale

      6  Ladies’ Arm Wrestling Match at the Blue Moon Diner

      7  Little Apophat

      8  Fish Out of Water

      9  Spaces

      10  Vigil

      11  Desire among Sparrows

      12  James River

      13  Victory

      14  Aria

      15  Late Bloom

        Notes

        Acknowledgments

        About the Author

1

Dappled Things

      Thank you day for dappled things—

      For ambrosia beetles streaking skylines inside a maple

      For pansies speckled as a painter’s sleeve

      For russet-crusted sidewalks of lichen, airy springs

      of fiery-structured fringe For pink corpuscles

      making midges soon to burst out the undersides of leaves

      Thank you for all that’s still somehow

      counter, original, spare, and strange

      For the brightening swell of a honeybee’s sting

      For the alien markings on my girlfriend’s cheek and how

      they form a perfect triangle

      Thank you for the risen stars on the skin of an apple,

      which I slice into fine, thin crescents

      For dapple is a word derived from apple

      and apple once meant any fruit at all

      born from a tree: lemon, fig, persimmon

      Thank you road apple, finger apple, earth apple

      for all that apple was before apple acquired

      a stigma for being forbidden—

      Marked, dappled, shadowed grappling,

      stamped juice, controlled smudging of

      what twinkles unthinkably

      And because I’m minion this morning to gay old music

      Thanks Gentle Hop for this this-ness, for teaching attention

      How to mark hard word-bodies with stress,

      acute glyphs, blue scores For reckoning the risks

      in discipline’s rod—between sheets of loose-leafed linen—

      You knew few might hear your coded address

      Do I look hard enough to receive?

      I am not moved by God, but I am moved by this

      To experience the largesse: What you look hard at seems

      to look hard at you O to be marked reciprocally, yes please

      Across, above, below and with

      I kiss my hand to male bonobos making out in public

      in spite of Western science

      trying to explain away The glorious kink

      of spinner dolphins’ whistle-clicks

      over-under rolling, belly-on-belly clasping by the soft tips

      of flukes, riding dorsal rudders to the brink

      I am inspired, call my girlfriend, say: Won’t you be my Olympic marmot

      chewing on my ear till I lift my tail?

      My black-billed magpie babble-singing