Quercus alba

Sonja Johanson

mott-gathered, hard
 as hunger

 rock-shelled, soaked soft
 cracked
 open with a maul

 three days
 in a basket, steeped

by the whiskey river
 destitute lobes,
 handful
in the pot, mouthful
in the cup

 one on the sill
 against the storm


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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