NO SEATS AND ONE TOILET

by Susan Cossette

Challenger Deep, Hades Zone—

There are better maps of the moon and Mars.

 

Humans like superlatives—

Highest, lowest, longest.

Hubris.

 

We sit cross legged, barefoot—

watching for golden pocketwatches,

chipped china and worn shoes, 

footprints sunk in silent ocean sand.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.

JANUARY 28, 1986

by Bonnie Proudfoot

All morning we waited, the January air frigid and clear, 

"Come see," I said, pointing at the tv. You settled your 

not-quite 3-year-old body beside me on the corduroy couch, 

my belly swelling with your little brother not yet born.

You were my playmate, usually you told me who to be, 

sometimes you were Robin Hood and I was Maid Marian, 

mostly we were Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia, 

but that day I called you the first spaceman, John Glenn, 

I was the first space woman, Christa McAuliffe, I pronounced, 

my teacher heart swelling, and then, you were leading me 

by the hand, into the capsule, we were waving to school children 

gathered to see the launch and even Tom Brokaw seemed 

to have his heart on his sleeve when he introduced 

mission control for the countdown, the lift off. 

 

On our couch from a mountaintop in West Virginia, 

surrounded only by the universe, we could almost see 

the Challenger capsule heading to that place beyond the sky, 

except, a jagged fork, that looked wrong, and then 

the waving stopped, hands covered mouths, children stood

in silence, and you looked up at me for answers 

I did not have. I'm sorry, I wanted to say. I'm sorry 

I called you over to watch with me, that you had 

to see this. Again and again, the tv replayed the lift off, 

as if, if they showed us once more, it would go differently. 

 

But no, the small streak of light, the speck of fire. Sometimes it takes 

so long to figure out what I want to tell you, even longer to know 

which words to use, and now, 35 years later, deep-sea divers find 

sets of Challenger tiles on the ocean floor, like pennies dropped 

into an infinite well. Oh, my boy, now man, now father, 

sometimes what you long for will disappoint you, and sometimes 

what you love will rise because of your love, and you'll rise too. 

All afternoon, on our little speck of earth, death walked 

beside us, his index finger waggling, a broken branch, 

and we did the only thing we could, we walked down the lane, 

gathered warm eggs from the hens, picked up limbs the wind

had flung onto the road, all eyes scanning the empty sky for signs

Bonnie Proudfoot has published fiction, poetry and essays. Her first novel Goshen Road (Swallow Press, 2020) was selected by the Women’s National Book Association for Great Group Reads, was long-listed for the PEN/ Hemingway Award, and received the WCONA Book of the Year Award. Her poetry chapbook Household Gods was published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2022. She lives in Athens, Ohio, and in her spare time she creates glass art and plays blues harmonica. 

SELF-DRIVING TESLA INVOLVED IN FATAL CRASH

by Don Hogle

Kazimir Malevich. Suprematist Composition: White on White (Oil on Canvas, 1918) The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 1935 Acquisition confirmed in 1999 by agreement with the Estate of Kazimir Malevich and made possible with funds from the Mrs. John Hay Whitney Bequest (by exchange).

“Neither autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied.” —TESLA Blog, June 30, 2016

There were no casualties this morning
when Bluetooth failed to connect
an iPod to the Onkyo receiver
that sends the French news
to speakers in my living room.

Nor did the Mac screen shatter
when a pop-up popped up
with the fatal words Cannot
get mail.

In the blue Pacific, rainbow fish
swim in and out of coral
encrusted bone somewhere
near where Amelia dropped
from the sky.

A crew of astronauts burst
once from their capsule like stars
in a meteor shower, glittering
briefly in their yellow-red descents
over Texas and Louisiana.

Madame Curie may have failed
to notice the fatigue in her bones,
but she saw a faint light glowing
from the tubes she carried
in her pockets.

And those at MoMA,
who might have missed
the cool white square tilted
on the warm white background
of a canvas painted by Malevich,
were just bemused by what they saw.

Don Hogle is a poet, blogger and brand and communications strategist living in Manhattan. Poems have appeared recently in Mud Season Review, Minetta Review, Blast Furnace, Shooter, Bethlehem Writers Roundtable and TheNewVerse.News among others.  He was a finalist in the Northern Colorado Writers’ 2015 Poetry Contest.