neces(sit)ies by Vanessa Couto Johnson | Really System Issue One

neces(sit)ies

Vanessa Couto Johnson

You tell me how the excrement of owls is oral. You blink slowly and your eyes rephrase
themselves.

Mosquitoes hum in your living room until I tell you. You shut the door as I pin one in
hand. We don't let them eat.

I make my leg acute on a chair at the café, asking if this is your method for double knots.
One adult touching another adult's shoelaces, the turn and turn and enter. Shoe stay.

Soups or solids. Salads with goat cheese hoofsteps. My lactiferous ducts near the plate.

Whatever I am, you trace me, testing the cartilage of my nose with a press. We refuse
stencils. We say that will be all.

Fry-piles make a half-moon on your plate while you continue a life of starch and iron.
Those things I take off of you. One by one button. Meet and potato.

Vanessa Couto Johnson recently earned her MFA from Texas State University. Her work has appeared in Hot Metal Bridge, shufPoetry, A cappella Zoo, Liebamour, blossombones, and other places. She has poems forthcoming in Star 82 Review, Sassafras, Eratio, and Dinosaur Bees. She runs treksift.com, blogs at meansofpoetry.com, and has a BA in both English and philosophy from Rice University.

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