Between the Artemis II Launch Live Stream and the Live Stream of the Supreme Court Hearing Arguments Regarding Birthright Citizenship
by Liz Ahl
Someday, humans may be born on the moon.
Whose moon may or may not be in dispute
in that future I imagine, as I flip from laptop tab
to tab on April Fool’s Day, feeling a little foolish
with the thrill-flutter summoned by the fully-fueled
rocket; feeling also a little edgy with my Gen X
rocket-gone-wrong memory. But thrill wins out
and I don’t look away as the biggest rocket
we’ve sent up since I was a toddler burns skyward,
moonward. As the nation burns deathward—
a rocket-spitting machine both fueled
and made rickety by insatiable greed, a sadistic
hybrid of automation and a deeply human cruelty.
I was born in the wing of a Naval hospital
that’s torn down now; the people who
conceived me in the moon-foolish summer
of 1969 and parented me for decades
are dead, and I’m feeling a little adrift,
a little nationless. A little unsure of my name,
my place. As if I’d been born on the moon.
Liz Ahl is the author of A Case for Solace (2022), winner of the 2023 New Hampshire Literary Award for Poetry. Her other collections include Beating the Bounds (2017) and a number of chapbooks, the most recent of which is A Stanza is a Place to Stand, published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2023. Poems have appeared recently in Rogue Agent, Cherry Tree, and River Heron Review. She lives in New Hampshire.