A Nun to Be Named Later
I’ve been thinking about the nun who wouldn’t let me pee in fifth grade.
There is no need to know her name.
She is dead and most of her clumsy cruelties have died with her.
But tell me: Who can you trust?
I trust the geese who are too stupid to migrate this winter.
I double-park to say hello.
I want to explain that I’m on a quest for authenticity.
They’re stumbling about, cold but apparently very happy.
They are like the lilies of the field, and so on and so forth.
I go back to the car and listen to a Miles Davis CD.
Supposedly, Miles stopped playing when he could no longer hear the music.
Was he telling the truth?
The truth is her name was Sister Josepha.
It makes no sense to hold a grudge.
By the same author
Vaccination, in the Broadest Sense of the Term, Crickets and Lucky Strike Lanes
Just as the pharmacist drove the vaccine into my arm
Peter Johnson, Excerpts from Observations from the Edge of the Abyss
In 1999, the eccentric Knott sent me thoughtfully inscribed cheap, staple-bound pamphlets of his poems, sometimes quoting from my own prose poems in the inscriptions.
The Literary Fragment, Black Humor, and the Ampersand: Three Short Essays by Peter Johnson
I want to talk about the “literary fragment.”