FROM SIEGE PSALTER
Delta
When thundering through the heavens I hear the B-2 Stealth Bomber—its elusive grace as it banks trailing fractals from its skin, its clandestine maneuvers, its trinitarian aerodynamism—I think of God. Dropping what ordnance I cannot tell, a fusillade unseen from where I cannot tell, kilotons to knock me into confusion. O Stealth Bomber, intermediary for the illegible, plead for me now in the hour of my whatever.
Hotel
How hospitable these hired rooms! Their square corners and the assurance thereof, their efficiency! Here is the room in which we first met, years ago, you playing the victim and me on my knees. Here is the room where, Love, you invited me to incline upon the cushions and eat, a night unlike all the other nights. Here is the room where you stand with your knives to prepare a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. My dear host, dear hospitaller, all your rooms have enemies, and all are a sacrifice to leave. In my solitude are many mansions.
India
Having smacked down the Bactrian satrapies, Alexander dragged his armies eastward: over the Hindu Kush, through defiant foothills, against sickness and mutiny and the unprovisionable mass of his battalions to the great river’s golden sands. So hungered he for the known world that he impious razed a hemisphere to possess its wreckage. Lucky, lucky world, to be so fiercely wanted.
Bio:
Kimberly Johnson is the author of Leviathan with a Hook and A Metaphorical God, as well as a translation of Virgil's Georgics forthcoming from Penguin Classics. Her work has appeared recently in The New Yorker and Yale Review, among other publications.
