CAR ENGINE

The universe came
in the form of a Blue
Jay flying into view

Jasmine blooms night
fertilize darkness
waiting for rainfall

Unseen music came
from Can you smell it?
his identity sweet

a candidate for the lost
pear-apples fall
touch breeze

split ripe to the ground
youths fumble
from bough to lap

impulse to destroy
the world arrives
rounded endlessly

milking milkweeds
an attempt to keep
going around and round


Juleen Eun Sun Johnson is an interdisciplinary BIPOC writer and artist. Johnson was born in Seoul, South Korea and adopted when she was three. She was taken to Valdez, Alaska where she spent her formative years. Johnson is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Fellowship. She is the recipient of the Cannon Beach Art Association Grant for writing and art. Her art has been shown at different institutions and galleries in the United States. 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: Poetry Northwest, Seventh Wave, 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 founding editor of Trestle Ties: A Landscape of Emergence.