from The Passage / The Thing

J †Johnson

From the killer’s perspective, the
door closes on the world. As he
picks up the phone, fingers shaky
over the dial, he can hardly wait for
an answer. All he can do is breathe.
The lake is alive with teenagers, &
he can only watch from the trees.
For a moment, she hangs over the
pool, & then she descends. A red
cloud fills the water, stirred by
severed limbs.

It’s a good while before Laurie
comes out of the closet. First she
hides, then cowers, then fashions a
weapon. Then rage finds her, & she
pokes it in the eye. When she makes
her way out, stepping over the fallen
shape, she still must leave the room
to enter the final hall. Surely she
knows it isn’t over, but she needs a
moment to gather herself for the
ending, fast approaching. Not so
fast, though, the shape looms. Peel
back the mask, then, have a look.
The sudden appearance of the
doctor, armed now with a device to
open endings, draws the film to a
close. We are left to visit empty
settings : the killer is among us, still.

She mirrors him across the street, as
across the house 1 sister becomes
another, poking through the wall. A
family sees itself across the yard.
The medicine cabinet is a portal
where the mirror was. Back in the
family drama the funhouse is a
backward mirror. 

The false face in the mirror. The
worn-through part. The mirror in the
mirror. The monster with no
reflection. The door in the distance
in the mirror. The tiny door in the
mirror. The empty mirror.

How do we make Michael Myers
come home? How does he escape
us? What do we need him for? He
has us right where we want him.

We’re the vampire in her bedroom
lair, putting on a record & waiting
for costume Dracula to make his
move. We’re undecided about
biting him or drifting in for a snug.
We’re also the rolling boy, half an
hour removed from making off with
a cat across a bridge over a culvert
full of bodies. We lost our car & our
composure but the girlfriendable
fiend’s skateboard rides smooth
over suburban badness, all the way
to the place she calls home, for now.
This time the monster & cat get along. 

A man giving birth to himself,
caught on film, not knowing. Throws
down his book again & again,
calling to us wherever we are.
Practical effects bring it off, but we
can’t go back. The transition goes
both ways, but only so far. Wolf,
man, something between. A moon,
perhaps.

Meet you at the pool. Meet you at
the pool dunked in grief, awaiting
the dark angel’s return. Meet you at
the abandoned socialist pool, still
full, not yet overgrown hopeless
gone gorgeous on the hill. Meet you
at the pool where we bind Nancy &
sit alone on the edge. Meet you at
the pool where the shark waits for
us, turning & turning on the floor. 

The square footage is impossible,
the corridors are endless, each door
is worse than the last. Even the
demon hag won’t go through the
last 1. You were lost long ago in a
rental home someone thinks they
own, with an aged killer in the sub-
sub-basement, gesturing at the side
table. Nudge it over for him, it’s
checkout time. That transom over
there : the way out is the way in. 

We walked down the embankment.
We climbed down the stairs. The
lower platform beckoned. We took
the escalator down. We succumbed
to the slide. We took the pole. Slid
down the hill. Down the falls in a
barrel. Down the tube. Down the
fucking drain. Circling. Shooting.
Slipping. We drift, down. We go
down & down. A descent takes us
down. We go down. We fall, down.
Down, down. Below us, our further
descent. We are low, then lowered.
We sink because we can. 

The writing is the walls. Every wall a
screen. Every page a door. Every
word an opening. Every passage a
scream.

We have trod the text wrapped in
canvas walls folded back into a box
though the ceiling is black not sky
not open not there. Those images
we walked through like doors are
images of doors. Here we are we
say as we walk through each to each
passage though we do so only in
gesture, the 1 that says you were
here in that lapse from being to
articulation & the being articulation
is in the idea of what time it is etc. 

Then B says it’s not your fault & you
say yes, yes it is. 

J †Johnson is the author of Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (punctum books, 2018), and a poetry collection, The Book / Or / The Woods (punctum books, 2021). Their writing has appeared in PEN America, Jacket2, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. A chapbook, trunc & frag, is at Our Teeth. Most recently, they completed a performative critical investigation of analog-digital interface, language-oriented poetry, digital language art, and experimental electronic music called Janky Materiality. They live in Philadelphia.