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Foley Catheter
     by Kimberly Johnson

 

I clean its latex length three times a day

                      With kindliest touch,

           Swipe an alcohol swatch

 

From the tender skin at the tip of him

                      Down the lumen

            To the drainage bag I change

 

Each day and flush with vinegar.

                       When I vowed for worse

            Unwitting did I wed this

 

Something-other-than-a-husband, jumble

                       Of exposed plumbing

            And euphemism. Fumble

 

I through my nurse’s functions, upended

                        From the spare bed

            By his every midnight sound.

 

Unsought inside our grand romantic

                       Intimacy

           Another intimacy

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Opens—ruthless and indecent, consuming

                        All our hiddenmosts.

            In a body, immodest

 

Such hunger we sometimes call tumor;

                       In a marriage

           It’s cherish.  From the Latin for cost.

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Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 15, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.  From Fatal (Persea Books, 2022).

 

I’m not sure this poem qualifies as a “favorite,” frankly, because it deals with such difficult material.  But I think that it’s effective in its willingness to reflect honestly on the combination of tenderness and brutality that eventuates when we choose to enter into relationship with others.  Love brings along with it the opportunity, the promise, of one party seeing the other into their death, bearing witness to the horrors of that inevitability as well as the intimacies it produces.  

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Kimberly Johnson photo.JPG

KIMBERLY JOHNSON is a poet, translator, and literary critic.  Her work has appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Iowa Review, PMLA, and Modern Philology.  Recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Utah Arts Council, and the Mellon Foundation, Johnson holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Literature from the University of California at Berkeley.  Kimberly Johnson lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.  kimberly-johnson.com

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