GLOW | QUEER Poetry FEATURE: YEVA JOHNSON

Photo Credit: Michelle Kilfeather

​Yeva Johnson, a poet whose work appears or is forthcoming in the Bellingham Review and Sinister Wisdom, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  A past Artist-in-Residence for Show Us Your Spines, part of the Marin Poetry Center and QTPOC4SHO, an artists’ collective, Yeva explores interlocking caste systems and human connections. 

​Artist Statement

Yeva Johnson, a Black American Jewish queer Lesbian feminist pacifist Unitarian Universalist mother and musician, is an emerging poet who works as a family physician by day.  Yeva’s poems are lyrical explorations of social hierarchies and interlocking caste-systems, the life cycle, nature and possibilities for interconnection. In a process she calls meta-ekphrastic, Yeva blends art, music, literature and other experiences to cross boundaries.  Her poems engage the reader/listener on multiple levels and touch people at their soft centers either through the written page or in performance. Yeva believes that art can connect us to the present, past, and future.  Some of Yeva’s favorite poets include Arisa White, Dawn McGuire, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Eve L. Ewing, Lucille Clifton, Lynn Emanuel, Pat Parker, Patricia Smith, and Sappho.  Yeva has been invited to be a reader at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco in August and September of 2020 (www.MOADsf.org).

Poetic Sisters
 
Her last poem
slips away.  My fingertips
close The Book of
Complete Works
and I miss her.
I yearn for her
despite not yet
having put her book
in its rightful
place on my shelf.
 
So when I turn to my other
sister outsider,
I can’t yet give my self
up to Audre
because Pat
Parker beckons
me still with
her innards.
 
As I had to
with June Jordan,
I learn that I
must live without
her.  All that’s
left are Pat’ pages.
 
After I recover my
more even keeled, black
lesbian, mother, pacifist, Jewish
feminist physician self,
then I can drink Audre in.
Drink deep but slow
like sampling a fine wine.
Lorde caught me up completely
in the poem for Martha.
 
I’m hooked,
sinking and swimming
reading and rejoicing
and mourning simultaneously.
Oh sister outsiders
would that I had seen you
Alive!
 
Lavender Black
  With gratitude to James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan
 
I am not your Negro
 
I am not your black lesbian unicorn
             I am not your
family doctor, nor am I
             your muse.
 
I was born a negro,
            transmogrified through
                              decades to
                                          Black, African-American
 
            And now back to black.
 
I am not your big girl
                I am not your girl, nor your woman
                               No damsel in distress.
 
I am not your
              Only Jew
                            You can’t identify me by
                                          my yarmulke because
                                                        I don’t wear one. 
 
I am not happy to be part
              Of one of the most racist
                            religions in America
Because, I am not your
              Unitarian Universalist.
 
I am not your
                Queer person of color
                               Advocate
 
Who recognizes crimes
              and misdemeanors
                             on sight.
 
No need to wait for
              years of evidence
 
To the inevitable
               recognition of the need
for impeachment.
 
I am not your
               classical musician
                             dabbling in the house
                                            of jazz.
 
I am not your elder
              aging, crone
                             now aching in the
                                            joints.

I am not yours
 
I just am.

​Both “Lavender Black” and “Poetic Sisters” are published in Sinister Wisdom:  A Multicultural Lesbian Literary & Arts Journal, Edited by Julie R. Enszer, Volume 112 Moon and Cormorant, Spring, 2019.