Marilyn Johnston

It’s Come to This

In the neighbor’s back field, the adopted
wild Appaloosa whinnies, then kicks
the old Chestnut mare in the chest.

I cannot bear to turn my head to look,
so I maniacally weed and I rake
our ragged garden rows.

I cannot judge this wild horse, as he
holds a tempest of power. As he stomps,
as his clipped gallop shakes the ground.

Instead of a trail of untamed freedom,
all that’s now left of his Steens Mountain
home is a half-acre of the neighbor’s lot.

I feel a kinship with his untamed soul—
his spirit within, trapped.
That familiar wild, resounding, cry.

With Every Breath

That night, as we ran around like meshugunahs,
putting anything that could fit in a sack—
a few family scrapbooks, each grandkid’s
favorite doll, a cup and saucer my grandmother

brought with her on her seasick voyage
to Ellis Island—whatever we could gather,
if the Beachie Creek Fire that roared down
the Santiam Canyon reached us over the next hill.

Level Two: Be Set to Evacuate warnings
buzzed our phones, the sky at 3 PM,
a strange ochre glow I can still see
if I close my eyes, mid-sleep.

We had an exit plan we’d practiced,
those years when the children were young—
how we’d escape and find each other,
after crawling from the burning door.

We thought we could let it go one day,
all we could not carry— value only
what we cradled in our clenched hands,
as long as we still breathed, wild and free.

And in the morning, as the winds
shifted, we found all around us
all that still was, yet would never
be the same.

And I recall that morning, in the still-smokey half-light
of day, how that trickster crow, who returned each
year to nest in our Douglas Fir, feed in our yard,
seemed to beckon to us, as she cawed and cawed.

As we watched from the singed
deck, she landed on the garden
gate, then picked the lock
until it sprung open, wide—

and we needed to believe
she wanted us to follow her
somewhere to clearer air.
Or was this atonement?

For was it not the crows who first
brought fire from the sun
to the world on the end of a stick,
carried to us in their clever beaks?

Marilyn Johnston is an Oregon writer and filmmaker. She received a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts and the Donna J. Stone National Literary Award for Poetry. She is the author of a chapbook, Red Dust Rising (Habit of Rainy Nights Press), and a full collection of poetry, Before Igniting (2020, Rippling Brook Press). Her work has appeared in such publications as CALYX, Timberline Review, The Poeming Pigeon, and Natural Bridge. She teaches creative writing as part of the Artists in the Schools program.