Good Friday
Julia Johnson
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Today even crueler than yesterday, you in your suit, tucked in, great and holy Friday. I keep you in the book I do not hold. The brave clouds roll in. Maybe you were meant to balance a glass on your head in my dream. Maybe Fellini taught me about white clowns. You taught me about the spectacular observation of things. I can’t believe it is not something I want to soon overcome. To forget a name or to lose something like a key easily replaced and then seen again on a highway sign as a reminder or as a copy identical to the last one. But here we are in a sudden shift. To everything having meaning, down to the new slow drip of the faucet or to the peek of white from the season’s first peony.
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People Are at Their Telescopes
Julia Johnson
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Waiting for the center of our galaxy to be in view. Waiting for a monumental occurrence we already know: An M87 black hole whose dark center is darker than before. A reddish doughnut, as they say, the color of a fox. We find ourselves wheeling around in it, a bottomless vortex. How we wait for the closest view, inside a spoon, but like a faraway pulse I am afraid we are looking again now. A sheet will come over our toes while we lie perfectly still. What are we doing there we ask ourselves while eating a small tart. The shape a rough circle in the eye seen from above. An approach to the extraordinary and suspicious universe. I follow you from the observatory’s highest deck. Put you in the sharpest focus.
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Julia Johnson, a native of New Orleans, is the author of three poetry collections: Subsidence (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2016), The Falling Horse (Factory Hollow Press, 2011), and Naming the Afternoon (LSU Press, 2002). She teaches creative writing at the University of Kentucky.
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Posted in All Hybrid: This Is It and tagged in #boudin, #flashfiction, #microfiction, Fiction, Hybrid