Johanna established the Red Room Company in 2003. She has produced and presented Red Room Radio show since 2001. Her poetry has featured in journals such as Quadrant, and the Best Australian Poems. In 2006 she created a series of literary TV shows The Wordshed, in partnership with The University of Western Sydney where she is a research associate. Johanna is an honorary associate with The University of Sydney's School of Letters Arts and Media. From 2007-2009 Johanna will be part of the St James Ethics Center Vincent Fairfax Fellowship .

No one mentions the cat scan

Fingers apporach the translucent rice paper

Like a doctor to a suture.

Mum’s time behind aprons can’t compete with your

Peremptory TAFE taught  technique.

Everything contained, one role at a time.

Family fixed on your fingers

that shake like long beans boiling.

Published Sydney writers’ festival 2003

Troubadours

The Addict

It isn’t you who
slinks along

it’s merely a machine
that pins & tacks

& tries to sew the
nine into the teen.

(Published March 2006; Journal of Australian Studies' Republished Wayside Chapel, Newsletter, 2007)

Tokyo Metro

Thigh high in uniforms, a posse of pigeon toed

girls flirt through text messages & languid blinks

Palm sized grannies fold into bows & nap alongside

loyal businessmen who store years of sleep in bags

beneath their eyes. Everyone dreams between stops;

these overpopulated trains - silent as chopsticks on rice.

Thigh high in uniforms,

a posse of pigeon toed

girls flirt through text

messages & languid blinks

Palm sized grannies fold

into bows & nap alongside

loyal businessmen who store

years of sleep in bags

beneath their eyes.

Everyone dreams between

Stops on these overpopulated

trains – silent as

chopsticks on rice.

Published, Quadrant Magazine, June 2004 , Best Australian Poems ;Black Inc Press, 2005

Review of ‘War’ by Sarah Kendall.

Digging through your grandfather's debris you unearthed
a handwritten letter linking you to World War Two.

Drafting his death into your stand-up comedy routine, you bait
The blinking heads with bloody, funny battle tales. But the pub

Meals and singing shrapnel steal some audience, leaving you
With bald laughs and wriggling necks with which to disembowel war.

Stage lights pound against your wobbling smile that begs for cheers,
Friends go berserk with loyalty, clapping along your concern for

Wars baked before your birth. A fellow in row two gets a whiff of
Your nonsense, as in the final fight for their attention you mould

Some clever quips about Hitler's girlfriends. The walls swell with
Laughter and for a second between breaths you rule a universe.

Published Hecate; Vol 27, 2001

STD in the family

Skulking in the base of her little

Spine; it’s a sweet gangrene eating

Away her childhood. Not making

Her crumble, but providing her with

The sensation of being chewed at.

Under-age hope watered down to

Dysfunction in the hot presence

Of an arrogant disease that has no

Public grace, just the crudeness

Of a private memory spilled openly.

A kiss which giggled at night, then gave

Birth to a bite, sinking itself into her

Future. An unlucky pact signed in a

Kid’s darkness, licked by an adolescent

Loyalty, loaded with sand.

Published Quadrant 2002

Conversation With A Friend

Conversation opened wide, into a cut,

Jovial responses stapled to the couch

By your icky banter about

Fishy vaginas, that smell like whitebait˙

Tacky chaffs honing off your lips,

Chafing the softness between friends.

Hours earlier you stoked the stretched

Tummy of your pregnant girlfriend,

Possibly you’ll have a girl,

Her fairy sized vagina, her little limbs

In your face, her tiny toes and leg spreads

Will kick open your mind.

Published Quadrant Magazine, 2002