Glacier Wildness

In our youth, glaciers winged free to the highway. We
shouldered off constantly repaved roads, bitten
by frost in winter, bubbled black tar in summer. We
soak in memory through hands, bitten—
fisted blue and turquoise, until the marbled gem, glaciers
ran through our fingertips, clear—
slow and fruitless. Calling
glaciers cobwebbed time—clear
painted gold, adults called them keys. Calling
photographic chemistry ocean cremations—called
babied by age. Without knowing the sting of bees. Calling
to the future, called

In our youth, we regret the earth;
we regret the chance to touch something.

Juleen Eun Sun Johnson is an interdisciplinary BIPOC writer and artist. Johnson was born in Seoul, South Korea. She was adopted and taken to Valdez, Alaska at the age of three. Johnson is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Fellowship. She was awarded the Cannon Beach Art Association Grant for writing and art. Johnson earned an MFA in Visual Studies from PNCA and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Johnson’s work has been published in The Rio Grande Review, Whiskey Island Magazine, Poetry Northwest and other journals and anthologies. Her poem won the Zone 3 Press Prize for Poetry. Johnson’s poems have been nominated for the Best of Net. She is the founder and editor of Trestle Ties: A Landscape of Emergence.

Edited by Bretty Rawson and Emilie Menzel.

The featured image was created for this piece by our Art Director, Meg Sykes.

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