10th Annual Juried Reading Finalist

Daniel Johnson

Daniel Johnson is a poet and photographer, who is currently finishing his MFA at Warren Wilson College. He works at Rush & Cook County hospitals as an artist-in-residence with the Snow City Arts Foundation. His poetry is featured in the current issue of American Letters & Commentary and also appears in the anthology I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio.

After Life

(Dead) we are lugging buckets of black
paint through the streets-
my sister (dead) stops to darken a pigeon;

my mother (dead) stoops
to smirch the steps of the church.
With bucket and brush

this is our job each night.
Night is night, my father (dead)
declares, because it's dark:

so we run through the world,
my brother and I, (dead, dead)
painting each fleck of light

black for the rapist, black for the stars.

© 2004 The Poetry Center of Chicago
All Rights Revert Back to the Author Upon Publication.
No Portion of this poem may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.