Wishful Thinking
We kiss
In a swirl of
Effervescent golden
Green; mingled auras render us
In love.
— Stace Johnson, 1987
Category Archives: Original Poetry
Vorticism 1987
Vorticism 1987
Miniature relays flash
OpenClosed at lightspeed
Screeching print heads
Pepper paper with
Insignificant ink points.
Short-lived electrons catapult
Through cathode-ray tubes,
Explode in green-screen triumph
And quickly fade.
Working late at the office,
Basking in eerie emerald light,
I settle into my
Silicon Mother’s arms.
— Stace Johnson, 1987
Rockwood 1887
Rockwood 1887
A grumbling black dragon
Snakes its way among snowy crags
Cursing the cold with blasts
Of steam and soot.
Its piercing scream rebounds
From ancient cliffs
As it once again challenges
The mountain.
— Stace Johnson, 1987
Rockwood
Rockwood
Winter marshmallows top lazy
Green Animas waters in the
Short daylight of a steep canyon.
An adventurous snowball
Hurls itself
From the forty-story cliff,
Spinning, twisting, sparkling, bounding
In freefall until
It splashes into the icy green.
Another victorious marshmallow.
— Stace Johnson, 1987
Mollie
Mollie
The high mountain Earth seeps
Blood-red mud
After her molybdenum
Rape.
The rapist does
Nothing but chuckle
And ask, “Did you
Climax?”
— Stace Johnson, 1987
A note about this poem:
A couple of people have mentioned to me that this poem bothered them because of the rape references, so I decided I’d better create some context.
On the route from Denver to Durango via Leadville lies the Climax Molybdenum Mine. Tailings ponds from the mine step down the valley on the north side of the mountain, and on one trip through there I was disgusted by the lack of respect for the area’s natural beauty. As I rounded a corner, a spring bubbled out of the ground by the road, soaking the iron-rich soil and turning it a deep, dark red.
From here, you can probably put all the pieces together, and see that this is really not a poem about violent male-female interaction, but about the negative aspects of large scale mining.