LuLu Johnson

LuLu Johnson is an Appalachian-based essayist and poet. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Georgia State University, studying with David Bottoms and Leon Stokesbury. She has been published in Prairie Schooner, Flyway, Atlanta Review, and more. Stephen Church selected her essay “In My Other Life” as winner of the University of New Orleans Study Abroad Prize, which went on to be published in The Pinch. LuLu currently has the joy of being in a writing group with Montana poet Sam Renken, and being mentored by Phillip Shabazz whom she met at Table Rock Writers Conference.

He Speaks to Me of Flying

We halt our trudge through the dunes, footsteps destined
  to be erased by dawn, and track two jets return to base.
Facing sunset, my aging Air Force father says, “This
  is the best time to get night hours, when you can still
  spot the horizon.”
                                   I hated him, so I must fight
  the flight response, battle to allow a tender pause
  in which time shelters us and flies back so that I am
  an eternal ground-pounder beside a man who can
  again pilot a jet, buzz rooftops, earn the nickname
  Vodka Head, log three thousand hours in a B-47 cockpit
  with an atomic bomb cargo circling Castro, Cuba.
Swifts soar and dip above us. In their erratic pattern I read
  his high hopes for me, how much I’ve failed to achieve.