Water Spell & Other Poetry

By Johnny Payne

Featured in New Lyre Winter 2024

Water Spell

A crocodile waits on the far sandbank.
I wade through waves, while my beloved casts
a water spell, a verbal shield to flank
my naked form against the river’s blast
in rainy season, mud roiling the waves.
The floodwaters, like land under my feet
Let me cross toward the perilous one who saves
me from the dangers she herself creates
reminding me her love’s what makes me strong.
For all I know, it’s her, not crocodiles
waiting to eat me, after long straight strides
take me right to her bosom, to her smile.
Thanks to her incantations, I step deep,
eager, as water murmurs, half-asleep.

Nuptial Dance

Ply her with beer and incense, those twin charms
fragrant at the outset, smelly after
but expeditious in twining her arms
and turning vulgar palaver toward laughter.
You’re just a bro, a brute, a knucklehead
with neither bad intentions, nor finesse.
With dull panache you stumble into beds
abetted by each woman’s fecklessness.
Later, you’re wed to one by random chance
when easily you could have wed another.
You’re deep in the post-ceremony dance
holding her mom, while she clings to your father.
Your kids will look like them and her and you
fated to wed and breed without a clue.

Figs

Laden with ripe and unripe figs, the tree
I rest beneath, blooming, sap-soaked and strong
its leaves like turquoise, with a glassy gleam
provides shade for whoever comes along.
I haven’t stirred yet. I’ve been lying prone
watching gray cloud-shreds whirl and retreat
as though bruised flesh pelted by random stones
from cosmic reaches by a hand unseen.
My fit has fled. I’m ready to rush home.
She’ll cradle my head, kiss the phantom wound
well-made with wasted words twice hard as bone
watch me revive from an afternoon swoon.
I watch for the next new-ripe fig to drop
into my hands, to crush to dark pulp.

Johnny Payne is Director MFA in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary's University in Los Angeles. He has published two previous volumes of poetry, as well as ten novels. In addition, he writes and direct plays in Los Angeles and elsewhere. His plays have been produced professionally and on university stages.