Amaud Jamaul Johnson is the author of Darktown Follies (Tupelo, 2013) and Red Summer (Tupelo, 2006), winner of the Dorset Prize. Born and raised in Compton, CA, his honors include a Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford, a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference fellowship, and Cave Canem. His poetry appears in Narrative Magazine, Harvard Review, Anti-, Eleven Eleven, VQR, The Southern Review, Indiana Review and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Curiosities Amaud Jamaul Johnson The year, this distance—   when brightly his face hums          and ticks like a washed                                        penny, and you can see him now           as a co-worker or neighbor or someone with whom you are willing to dissolve an empty           hour on a train.                       O, the winking unshuttered transient heart. His bridgework, his thin                    and yellowed nails. No.     The trees, whipping black as the stitched binding of my book. What mysteries. The Word, pierced           and dangling,                     and dark as amethyst.