Poetry
A Portal to The Early Universe
By Julia Johnson
We were invited to a star party in Big Bend
The only time we’d ever been to Texas
To be a stargazer would be a luxury it seemed
Like getting to see polar bears
In the Canadian High Arctic Tundra
Or having a massage at the remote
Chenot Palace Weggis in Switzerland
We packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
And Coke, wore comfortable walking shoes
To make the trek up to the McDonald Observatory
We were told stars were the identity of this landscape
We held hands as if separating and walking alone
Might cause us to lose our way in the dark
If scientists are mapping the universe for us
We hope we find our way in whatever era of cosmic time
We now live
Huntington
By Julia Johnson
In downtown we stop for Bolognese
at the converted funeral home
now Savannah’s on 6th
We contemplate the Around the World Wine Dinner: Destination #2: Italy
but just have the Bolognese
with a tiny filet sliced and placed on top
like a tiny pile of pinewood
We scour the menu for mint ice-cream
but have the chocolate ganache
With Motown we chat with the smiling waitress
from Greensboro who’s just had
a kidney transplant.
South Charleston, West Virginia
By Julia Johnson
Travis whom I just met sits on the curb
Twirling a pair of eclipse glasses between two fingers
His cell phone in his other hand says hi
asks me if I’d like to take a look at the sun
and I say you mean the moon
And say yes, I would
He says he won’t live to see
another eclipse in twenty years and I say sure you will
Atop the Indian Mound in the center of town at the foot of D Street
Where I stand a block away
a crowd gathers ready to watch the great disappearing act of the sun
The moon an unrecognizable disc slowly slipping
Across the light and carving a glowing and fuzzy sharpening crescent
Travis and I pass the glasses back and forth
Each minute the view through the glasses a sun that looks instead like a dark
Moon a bit slimmer and sharper in focus high in the wide expanse
And again and again
The last time an eyelash floating on end in the sky
The Earth Is Shaking Less
By Julia Johnson
Julia Johnson
Julia Johnson is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where she founded and directed the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Prior to joining the faculty at Kentucky, she taught at Hollins University, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow and studied under Rita Dove, Gregory Orr, and Charles Wright. She is the author of the poetry collections Subsidence (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2016), The Falling Horse (Factory Hollow Press, 2012), and Naming the Afternoon, (LSU Press, 2002), which won the Fellowship of Southern Writers George Garrett New Writing Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Cincinnati Review, Poetry International, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Washington Square, and numerous other journals and anthologies.