A black carriage trudging through the mud of Time. “I am a star visible only to the blind,” I say to Astra. “I am a smudged fingerprint left on the disgraced priest’s abandoned chalice.” “Was I really named after an extinct constellation?” she asks—a question followed by a fevered twittering of tiny birds. What a spectacle! One of those unheard of moments, which some addle-brained ornithologist would most certainly designate “prophetic.”

:::

Mirabel’s favorite song is the “Komodo Dragon Blues,” which, understandably, led us to the zoo after a morning of “furious” lovemaking, after which we lay in bed reading from the soon-to-be-discovered journals of Alexander the Great, whom we felt existentially in synch with, mostly because of his fascination with exotic beasts and because, according to Diodorus, he always smelled great. Also, the previous night I’d had a dream about a tree kangaroo, who himself had dreamt himself into the body of a tree frog under the premise that the “tiny is enormous.” It was the old dream within a dream dream, whose banality was not lost on Mirabel, as she fed leftover crust from her peanut butter sandwich to a family of strolling Canada geese.

:::

We were whining and dining, waiting for the virus to evaporate and become nothing more than a carbon-dated memory. I had just read about a woman who claimed to be the Mother of All Things, and that in another life had been the illegitimate daughter of a deranged ex-president with orange hair. “I just want to get out of the pool,” Mirabel said, “but, unfortunately, I’m still a fish.” How could she have guessed I’d mistake her harmless metaphor for one of the Eternal Truths, forever imprisoning us within the invisible bars of the metaphysical?

* Republished here with poet’s permission from his digital book Observations from the Edge of the Abyss (Providence College, 2023).

See also the Plume Special Feature of Issue 146 (October 2023), which includes 11 additional excerpts:
https://plumepoetry.com/fragments-from-observations-from-the-edge-of-the-abyss-by-peter-johnson/

A free download of Observations from the Edge of the Abyss is available via Providence College at:
https://works.bepress.com/peter-johnson-PC/1/

Peter Johnson

has published seven books of prose poems, six novels, two collections of short stories, a book of essays on the prose poem, and three anthologies of prose poetry. His poetry and fiction have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Rhode Island Council on the Arts, and his second book of prose poems was awarded the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His most recent book, While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems (2023), is available through the publisher MadHat Press and at Amazon.

More information, along with interviews and videos, can be found at the author’s website:

http://www.peterjohnsonauthor.com/

and on his Substack site:

https://johnsonp.substack.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Truscon, A Division of Republic Steel, 1969-70: A Prose-Poem Sequence Disguised as a Lyrical Essay, Itself Aspiring to Be a Fictional Memoir by Peter Johnson in Plume (Issue 123, November 2021); and reprinted in While the Undertaker Sleeps, a collection from his previous books along with new works

⚡ Peter Johnson’s While the Undertaker Sleeps, a review by John Brantingham in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 19, August 2023)

⚡ “No Succinct Summary Will Do Them Justice” by Clare MacQueen in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 2, March 2020), a review of A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries From 80 American Poets on Their Prose Poetry (MadHat Press, 2019), edited by Peter Johnson

⚡ The Prose Poem: An International Journal began publication in 1992 as an anthology of prose poetry from around the world. Edited by Peter Johnson, now professor emeritus at Providence College (RI), nine volumes were published over the next decade and are preserved as digital issues courtesy of the college. These issues have received more than 200,000 unique visitors during the past ten years.