L. A. Johnson

poetry

L. A. Johnson is the author of Lost Music (Milkweed Editions, 2027) and an associate editor of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems of Larry Levis (Graywolf Press, 2026). She holds a PhD from the University of Southern California, where, through academic years 2023-25, she was a Mellon Humanities and University of the Future Postdoctoral Fellow. The winner of the 2022 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the 2022 Greensboro Review Poetry Prize, and the 2021 Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize, her poems appear in The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is currently a Hughes Fellow at Southern Methodist University. Find her online at la-johnson.com.

 

Catharina

Beloved wife Of Antonio Lemas Died in Mendocino City Jan 17 1890 Aged 43 years and 4 months Peonies at the market, three to a bundle. You think to rest them on a stranger's grave. On hers. An offering. A weathered wood plank discarded across where the head would go. You clear it off. The grass beneath it stays bent. Grass grows beneath the beds of your beloveds, beneath your own bed. How much time has passed since a loved one has been here? A cathedral of absence. Home. Her name in the mouth of no one but yours. You arrange the flowers against the marble. The headstone rises in pale light.

“ I was in Mendocino, California, for a writer’s conference and my hotel room window looked directly into a graveyard—the graveyard where I saw this tombstone for Catharina, among so many other overgrown gravesites from the 1800s. Graveyards provide us a site for mourning, but they also attempt to cosset grief, to keep grief out of view. In Mendocino, many of the graveyards are so old, they have simply become part of the landscape, transforming from something hidden away into an almost-field where children might put daisies in their hair. Who was Catharina? How do we honor and remember the dead? And what will happen to the graves of my loved ones when no one who loved them is still alive to visit? ”

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