Johanna Magin

They ask her what it feels like

The day is nervous, danger rising
like ash water in the brain, muddied
crumble, a feeling for misfortune,
she turns up the heat, seeks bitter
things to eat. Each day is like this: neurons wired
upwards toward the sky, branches scraping
cirrus and nimbus, little fingers uncoiling
for the coolness of touch, something
as much as meaning makes her head stir.
How come? is the question. How not?
is her answer. While the others look on
aghast, she scratches a single itch
which has meant she will not sit still
  in a pale office, or make motions
to please them. Instead, she will rise
from her seat and carry the thing
across the room, and hand that creature
to her colleagues, so that maybe
they will know what it feels like.

Johanna Magin holds a PhD in French Literature from Columbia University and is based in Paris. Her poems appear widely (some forthcoming) in North America and the UK, most notably in: Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO, The Georgia Review, The Bennington Review, Wildness, Poetry Wales, and Nimrod. Her recent honors include: finalist for the 2025 National Poetry Series (US), finalist for the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize, finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 17th Annual Poetry Contest, winner of the 2024 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize (selected by Cole Swensen), winner of the 2024 Francine Ringold Awards in Poetry, and long-listed for the 2024 National Poetry Competition (UK). More of her work can be found at https://johannamagin.com/.

Johanna had this to say about her poem:

Normative social structures can be cruel to those who carry invisible difference or struggle. That struggle can be any number of things — grief, depression, chronic illness, disability — and so in writing this poem, I left it to the reader to fill in what that might be. Ultimately, the poem is asking what it would take to make legible that which is fundamentally incommunicable. Can we ever really know another’s embodied experience?