"Crutches"
In high school I loved every girl who had them, fell for little fingers
curled around the foam rubber grips, for the chunky plaster cast
full as a dance card with names. Bent-knee peep show
of toes glossed Candy Apple, nails a row of shrinking red faces
like those secretly hollow dolls that nest inside each other.
Karen Wynn fringed the cut leg of her Levis over her cast,
teasing the threads fine as mohair till they tickled my dreams.
She swung between them from Chorus to Chemistry,
ticking crutch-tip, toe, crutch-tip, toe till I went sick with wishing,
my heart knocking to her slow rhythm. Why worried me: it was
the odd leverage, I guess--the way they walked on palms and armpits,
it pried at my ribs. Their casts were public as our paint rock,
where at night little groups of us sprayed names, love,
and bonehead wit in big, first-grade letters. A hurt girl's
homeroom would kneel one at a time and scribble:
inside, her fibula, in the warm grip of girl muscle, knit.
All I knew to write was my crooked name, nowhere near her toes,
But in the middle, where the snow of plaster was deepest,
where, itching under my gray lead name, she might lay her hand.
Books by Gordon Johnston
Durable Goods (Finishing Line Press, 2021)
Scaring the Bears (Mercer University Press, 2020)
Ocmulgee National Monument: A Brief History with Field Notes (authored with Matthew Jennings) (Mercer University Press, 2018).
Gravity’s Light Grip (Perkolator Press, 2007)
