Samuel Washington Allen Prize Finalist, selected by Jennifer Garfield
Roman Johnson, PhD is a writer and scientist from Memphis, TN. He is a second–year MFA student in poetry at Brown University and the winner of the Clark Atlanta Poetry Prize and the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press. He is a 2025 Lambda Literary Workshop Fellow in Fiction and has received numerous other fellowships and residencies from institutions like Linda Hall Library, Breadloaf, Tin House, and Knoll Farm. His writing found in anthologies and journals such Obsidian, African Voices, and elsewhere.
Hockey
After Carl Phillips
was an effervescent thing. To hold the black disc
in my hand and then smash it with a stick and
watch it warble into timelessness, into the distant
field of white. To have balanced with then, finally,
the mantras you spoke in the morning
and watch the shade of your hands shine
as you talk about the practice of letting him
go and I wonder if you loved him after
deleting that contact from your phone and remember
the making of things, the aroma of the meal we made:
fingerling potatoes, roasted angus beef and stewed carrots,
peach cobbler for dessert and a bottle of Prošek wine
whose sweetness I can taste at the back of my of throat
like the familiar emptiness I felt when I was with you
or the sprung rhythm of time where I was twenty
and not nearly as comfortable with being alone.
I dreamed your ancestor spoke to me, you said, half asleep
like a palm reader woman of an entranced moon.
I questioned the motivations behind your touch, how sex
could bring you such spiritual clarity,
if I should lean into this rush like guilt
wants to rush into my heart. Somewhere,
there was infatuation. Do you recall?
Too many moments pretending
like I didn’t see the blinding silver light again
when I open my eyes blocking the sound of what
things are: the pine trees, the hyacinth bushes, the choke berries
and silver river that turns in a park where I am alone again,
where I see the mist on my hands and let my body untighten
until I no longer want to make contact.
Dear black goalie mask of memory.
Dear bristle moss, kind moss,
I am learning to abandon regret that the crisp air
and the solid ponds make less aching. To hum a tune
and not be consumed by it, and copy the birds
around the cypress tree you sit upon and
watch them move, not worrying about a thing.
And some call that living. Those strands of morning glow
before that first darkened cloud just below the bramble
of branches above. I dreamed that I felt good about myself
again. Bluejays. The moon hiding behind the sun.
Just enough to know.