Iskra Johnson

Issue XV cover

The Fragility Project

Each morning I wake, reach for my phone and shuffle to the kitchen, the kettle, and eventually, when my eyes have taken in enough of the world and worry to stir up hunger, hold the simple chill of an egg between thumb and finger and tap it against cast iron. Eggs have been here ever since I can remember, delivered by the dozens in a familiar cardboard valise so exquisitely engineered that to look for cracks seems insulting. If I check, I do it absently, smiling and looking away as my hand rolls across the top of the shells to show that I am only humoring my mother’s memories of the Depression, and I know everything is just fine. 

White phosphorous rolls across the screen of my phone. The vapors of war, tinted palest blue, carmine, saffron, this new and unexpected uncanny white, disturbingly beautiful as it floats above Lebanon. Turn the volume down and consider the architecture of two shells stacked one in the other nestled on the sink. How light from the window reveals a honeycomb of fissures just below a crack, how the top shell arches like the canopy of a baby carriage, how very white it is, and how, like a moon shell, the shape is both home and ruin, abandonment and birth.

An egg, so austere in its self, needs a nest. How even to begin? 

I lay out my collection, each delicate structure of straw and twigs on the edge of dissolution, and photograph for days, mesmerized and terrified by complexity. To draw a nest I need the weaver’s mind that thinks like a bird, trusting the intelligence of random arrangement. This is not something I am accustomed to. I sharpen leads to a needle point, sift graphite onto cotton and test every paper, looking for one that forgives revision. Over the weeks I learn to look up and away every few minutes, alert to every sound or hint of movement in the air, and only then do I begin to work like a sparrow, lifting straw, letting it fall, burying it under dry moss. 

Every so often, returning with a bit of string and cocking its head as though perplexed, a sparrow turns its back on the insensible heap and fluffs its feathers without looking. It is then, through trusting intuition, that a collection of haphazard lines becomes refuge, that place where a fragile thing can be born and stay safe. The act of drawing, the silent attention to how shadow describes shape through light, is as close as I have come to faith.  

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