2 poems
from Plasticland
Herein
Biology is an enormous subject, one that can seem overwhelming to students and scientists alike. In the lecture hall I missed a lot. One rich diagram about cascades could unleash in me cascades of thought, cocoon me in imagining and boom the hour was up. I loved to make connections and study the figures. I did not learn what they wanted.
They wanted us to learn what companies can use. I wanted to transform the way I see.
Textbook pages told cycles, cycles within cycles: the efficient workings of the living. I desired ferns and fur and skin. I loved the living, so why not the machine of them? I loved the drawings of metabolic pathways, where excess product blunts production. The language of balance, arrows feeding compounds back into the reaction. Elegant self-regulation. The new created, not too much.
—
A long time later I came to live in a house on the edge of a forest, sleeping under cedars every night, my offspring in the next room growing furiously with sleep. Cedar is thuja plicata, Western red. All cedars have scaly, fern-like needles that tend to overlap. They do not point or pierce. Cedar fills my window, a great green lacing down—countless fingers, new tips of bright growth.
She anchors the system, sharing air with fir and maple above the groundling sword fern and mahonia and snowberry. She needs a lot of space to make the shade. Her seedlings spindle up everywhere. Few grow into giants but when they do they stay.
Cedar offers birds and wildlife year-round cover from predators and bad weather, along with places to roost, rest and nest. Butterflies embed their ova in her bark. Gray squirrels scamper-cling along her giant trunk, their bodies splayed to barely hold her. When I say cedar, I mean mother. When I say cedar, I mean being the main thing.
—
At home in the house on the edge of the forest, at work for the college on the outskirts of the city, tending two children, two animals, and countless plants, balancing energetic expenditure always with a spouse, responsible for the learning of hundreds of students every year, I’m pulled in circles and pushed by arrows, each day carrying out cycles, each day-cycle subsumed in sets of larger cycles. Job and sweat and screen time and so many kinds of holding. Daily reprieve, generational harm. All of us lodged in words that end with -ism like shell bits tumbling in a tide. Birth and the death inside of it, joy and the panic it can spark. The troublesome design I call myself: worn down and regenerating, locked in exchange and conversion, trading in the currencies of energy.
Some pathways result in more instead of less: positive feedback, where the product turns its own production up. Platelets clotting a bloody gash release compounds that draw more platelets in. The textbook example is childbirth, hormones contracting the womb in ever-amplifying waves until one body exits another. Let me be clear: the body I sometimes wish to exit is my own.
—
Herein I translate my own here into small reactions whose products float as if inside a giant body—atmospheric, accreting.
The larger situation proliferates a culture: well-intentioned harm; indifference with eyes trained on acquisition. What follows might be read as a long attention to microscopic, daily countervailing forces.
What follows might be read as one poem turning through reactions of stasis and conversion.
What follows might be read as a woman up in the dark burning a candle, spilling words until the sky lightens in the rationed minutes when no one needs her.
What follows might be read as a domestic sphere wishing to declare itself a microcosm.
What follows wishes to be considered an organism in the balance of self-maintenance and change.
What follows is another walking sac of carbon in a climate made too warm by too much carbon, the sac of carbon never not-thinking about its own excess.
Atmospheric, accreting: what follows sometimes forms a cloudland. Heavy air takes on more weight and then it rains.
Of Small Devices
We used to place the telephones in cradles but now they are no longer baby-like no they are thin portals to vast streams the way in dreams a small thing unlocks something very large.
We wake to our feeds in a house with a little land around it next to other houses with a little land around them more land than anyone needs and less land than people need in common and to maintain this house to fold lovingly each of its garments to trim its edges shape its shapeable shrubs could be a person’s full time job. Your energy now taken up by your feed by the emotional exoskeleton of text threads with their fibrous connection to all your feelings all your cherished bullshit. You take a break you open tabs consuming abstract notions of students’ ideal functioning and children’s ideal functioning and the body’s ideal functioning.
The students gather in classrooms and silence their feeds. The reaction called learning is often thought to be inefficient a constellation of individual reactions in which the instructor competes in the student’s mind with formations originating elsewhere and no one is sure if learning has in fact taken place.
It is in fact your job to measure learning the products of which are unclear.
The students’ feeds their threads pile information silently the students have stored in their mind whatever feeds their imaginations whatever makes them feel okay for this hour. You are standing in front of them checking in on their learning you feel your own feed humming in the pocket.
After the children are in bed you check the feed the feed unlocks the compound known as rage a belligerent famous face catalyzes in a cage around the heart the antique lace of impotence and danger. The strange round hole of the man’s mouth. Even all stirred up he cares to hide his crooked childhood teeth now super white and straight. You recognize that your hatred is feeding him somehow he consumes it and he swells.
The formations of the feed, the text thread webs proliferate unchecked. The forest you live beside was meant to burn. The groundling species first and maples cedar though—will char and still withstand. Wildfire now suppressed the overstory grows too thick the understory tinder-quick to catch.
//
Jessica Johnson writes poems, essays, and things in between. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Tin House, and Poetry Northwest, among other journals, and she has newer work in the Four Way Review, Entropy, Burning House Press, and Dream Pop. Her book In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (New Michigan Press) was an Oregon Book Award finalist. She lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches at a community college.