NIGHT HIKING

Winner of the 2019 Winter Contest.

He liked to hike at night. When the glow from the headlamp 

lit up only a few feet before us. My footsteps soft behind,

he never had to look at the size of the mountain he was climbing. 

He would not see it this way. He would say he preferred the bite 

of the air, how the stillness was thrilling, the rush of being 

the only ones awake under the sky. Once we got lost 

at the top in a boulder field. Snowflakes stung my cheeks red 

as they spun into midnight. Searching for the fire tower we took turns 

in our fear, grabbing fistfuls of indigo, scrambling up and onward,

the path narrow, the splits too subtle and sudden to catch. I wish 

I had felt it then, how the fog that swallowed the mountain 

would come for us, too. How we would not see the things before us, 

our vision tunneled as the beam of the flashlight. Pupils stretched wide

to the lip of the basin, gulping down the night, we would miss 

the mountain’s precipice, miss the bends and blooms. If we had paused, 

let the crescent moon illuminate every shadow, every inky figure,

we might have turned to face the cliffs, appreciated their enormity, felt 

our thirst and taken slow sips of the dawn instead of lapping at darkness. 

Joanna B. Johnson

Joanna is a poet and Spanish-English bilingual educator. Originally from Seattle, she holds a master’s degree in Social and Cultural Foundations of Education from the University of Washington. Her poetry can be found in Midway Journal and Wasafiri Magazine. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She lives with her partner in Córdoba, Spain where she teaches and writes. She is currently at work on her first chapbook.

Rakicevic Nenad

Image by Rakicevic Nenad from Pexel.