Ageratina altissima

Sonja Johanson

 the milk, and the bone –
 sickness and break fever

women in their crinoline
 cages

 round-toothed, scalloped
 feet planted so close
 together

 birthing herb,
snakeroot, richweed, sanicle

 ruptured shade   the febrile wood
 white island
 in a sea of heat

terete-wrap your breeze around
 my aching legs
 and tongue


Sonja Johanson has recent work appearing in the Best American Poetry blog, BOAAT, Ninth Letter and The Writer’s Almanac. She is a contributing editor at the Eastern Iowa Review, and the author of Impossible Dovetail (IDES, Silver Birch Press), all those ragged scars (Choose the Sword Press) and Trees in Our Dooryards (Redbird Chapbooks). Sonja divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine.

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