Connie Johnson

           You Are My Jazz Cognoscenti

And you follow me home:
boxcar graffiti spelling out your name with splashes
of red notes and memory; it takes miles to explain this
as we conjure the same thoughts and energy.

We are linear language
and there are ten thousand ways to decipher us.

Some people call us Elegant Negroes as a sign of endearment
and that’s a song you can sing in three octaves! We swing with Dizzy,
we swing with Paganini and the Duke.   That night I took you to the
Mocambo Club in 1955 is the night that changed everything.

You competed with the First Lady of Song and came in second! 
Nothing more than decorative furniture, nothing more than
a discarded Cole Porter Songbook. You never got a chance
to jump the fence and go mainstream, but there are ten
thousand reasons for that.

I carry all of your quarter notes
in my velvet, top handle pocketbook. And while I am guilty
of many a tawdry and blues-plated crime, I never once
forgot you, Little Sister.

Connie Johnson Connie Johnson is a Los Angeles, CA-based Pushcart Prize nominee whose poetry has appeared in San Pedro River Review, Syncopation Literary Journal, Cholla Needles, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, The Rye Whiskey Review, Sport Literate, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. *Everything is Distant Now* (Blue Horse Press), her debut poetry collection, is available on Amazon; *In a Place of Dreams*, her digital album/chapbook, can be found at www.jerryjazzmusician.com