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At the botanic garden, a map
claims there is a swamp and I am a cynic through yards of paths until boardwalk over black water. Green lacing fractions of surface. You spot a pie-sized portion of honeycomb floating. Amber grids waiting to feed unseen animals. This water thick with mirroring such that I imagine our time doubled for our duplicates, whom I do not lean to see. This dark fluid an event horizon. We cannot stay to learn what lurks. We try a perimeter path, completing our orbit back toward parked cars and what looks to be wedding guests we keep our distance from, nearing signs naming roots within the ground. |
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Vanessa Couto Johnson is the author of Pungent dins concentric, her first full-length book (Tolsun Books, December 2018). “Try the yen relish,” a sixteen-page prose poem sequence, is in a first BoxSet from Oxidant | Engine. Softblow, Thrush, Field, Blackbird, Cream City Review, and other journals have featured her poetry. She is the author of three chapbooks: speech rinse (Slope Editions’ 2016 Chapbook Contest winner); rotoscoping collage in Cork City (dancing girl press, 2016); and Life of Francis (Gambling the Aisle’s 2014 Chapbook Contest winner). She is currently a Lecturer at Texas State University, where she earned her MFA.