Jill McCabe Johnson

Scientists Confirm Interplanetary Dust Clouds Orbit Earth

Fog enveloped the trail, so we marveled
at tiny strawberry leaves turning yellow with winter cold
and mosses draped like velvet over rocks, but nothing
was as vibrant as the neon-yellow paper airplanes
littered just over the ledge.
                                            Ever since your death
I’ve been in a similar fog, hesitant to look down the barrel
of your depression and my own recriminations, the endless
what-ifs.
               You didn’t believe in heaven and hell,
but maybe a dispersal of sorts, your essence released
in a mist of ever after as your energy morphs
and circulates.
                        I like to imagine the same fate for us all,
that regardless of how we die, a kind of universal crux,
call it a soul if you want, of who we are orbits
to invigorate new life, even if our personalities
perish.
           Some believe the afterlife exists
only as long as we persist in the memories of others,
perpetuated by their love, and we don’t fully disappear
until no one’s left to remember us.
                                                        Making my way
down the hillside today, I picked up the airplanes
and pictured children tossing the folded papers to see
how long they’d stay aloft before they settled
on the trail.
                   Soot covered each missive, and tucked
inside the pleats their handwritten notes began
My favorite memory of you is…
                                                    At the party,
you played music—a satin ribbon of sound—
and I like to believe your voice swirls above us still
in a cloud where anything is possible,
where the universe echoes the song that was you.

Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of two chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections, most recently, Tangled in Vow & Beseech (MoonPath, 2024), finalist for the Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and Sally Albiso Poetry Award, plus the memoir, Learning to Spar, forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. Honors include Nautilus Awards in Poetry and Nature Writing, Longreads' Best of 2021 Stories, eight Pushcart nominations, and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Artist Trust, and Hedgebrook. Recent works have been published in One Art, Fourth Genre, Terrain.org, Booth, Sweet, Lunch Ticket, and VerseDaily. Jill is editor-in-chief of Wandering Aengus Press and its imprint, Trail to Table Press.