GOODNIGHT, MINI-MOON

by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News

Soon an asteroid, captured in our gravity,

will pirouette our planet like a little moon.

I picture the new satellite wearing a tutu 

with pink tights wrinkled at the knees.

Wait, do moons have knees? Maybe

Mother Luna will teach her new prodigy 

how to pose for the light, waxing & waning

through each phase of its two-month stint,

orbiting around our world. 

 

                              When my girls were little,

I taught them the five basic poses of ballet.

Fifth position was always the toughest—

toes pointed out, toe-to-heel-to-toe-to-heel,

rounding arms up above your head to form 

a full moon. And like their short-lived interest

in leotards and ballet slippers, this mini moon

will soon grow tired too, of twirling around

in the same old circles. She will break free

to see what’s in store, to explore the unknown,

chart her own course, no matter how bleak 

or cold it may seem to me. 

 

Author’s Note: According to an article in The New York Times, an asteroid, 2024 PT5, will be captured in Earth’s gravity and circle our planet from Sept 29 thru Nov 25, effectively becoming a small moon, until it breaks free and flies off into space. 

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poems have appeared worldwide in literary journals including  ONE ART, Naugatuck River Review, Eunoia Review, The New Verse News, Poemeleon,  About Place Journal, and Snapdragon, to name a few. She is the author of What She Was Wearing, and her manuscript Pockets was a finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest. She’s co-founder of The Poetry Box press and managing editor of The Poeming Pigeon. Shawn is a proud mother of three and Nana to one darling baby girl. She shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon.

ALL ABOUT YOU ON DECEMBER 12, 2023

by Andrės Castro

A rare astronomical event will be perfectly positioned in the night sky on Monday (Dec. 11) for some parts of the world. On that evening, an asteroid will pass in front of the curious red star Betelgeuse, eclipsing it from our vantage point here on Earth and blocking it from view for up to 15 seconds in an event known as an occultation. The asteroid is known as 319 Leona, a main belt object that orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter. Shaped roughly like an egg, 319 Leona measures some 50 by 34 miles (80 x 55 kilometers) in size. Such an event occurring to a well-known and bright star is an uncommon occurrence. Astronomers are calling the event "an extraordinary and unique opportunity" to study Betelgeuse's photosphere, the star's visible layer from which it emits most of its energy. The Virtual Telescope Project in Rome, Italy will host a free livestream (see below) of the event starting at 8 p.m. EDT on Monday, Dec. 11 (0100 GMT on Dec. 12). —Space.com

You are certainly inspiring Betelgeuse, so brazenly out there

in the night sky, especially for a poet like me, closer to leaving 
the earth than ever before. It must be amazing to be a supergiant
red star burning away in the night sky in your old age, before your 
shrinking, puffing up even larger. You may have been the red giant
in a poem I wrote about my estranged younger sister, who I see again
on your burning surface, standing like a queen, surrounded by flames, her 
arms outstretched, waiting to embrace me. I wrote it as a lamenting love poem,
one asking for forgiveness for not being a better big brother and falling short,
not knowing how to grow our love as we got older, not doing enough 
to protect her, seeing her lose all her potential to fly as she was
lured into a cage with empty promises, only to lose herself,
lose her potential to fly so sadly young. I have grown
to be a feminist raising my daughter; at least
I protected her, even with my mistakes. 
Enough about me and mine and not
mine: this poem is about you.
Thank you. Fuck that
asteroid, Leona,
coming round
to eclipse
you.

Andrés Castro, a PEN member, is listed in Poets & Writers Directory. He posts work on his personal blog, The Practicing Poet: Dialogue to Creativity, Poetry, and Liberation.

HUBRIS

by Robbie Gamble

News item: scientists are jubilant

as a golf cart-sized hunk of space

payload pulled up and T-boned

a minor asteroid a touch more

massive than Fenway Park—

a veritable bullseye—our first

home entry into the extraterrestrial

demolition derby. Newsfeeds showed

grainy shots of an apparent pumice

stone looming in the void, then

a blank screen, followed by polo-

shirted Mission Control engineers

high-fiving and avowing “This one’s

for the dinosaurs!” as if they

might have changed the course

of paleontology had NASA been

operational back at the end

of the Cretaceous Era. Today

we are watching as Hurricane

Ian, a Cat 4 beast, is slamming

into the Florida Gulf Coast, and I

bet there’s a whole bunch of golf

carts being swept inland with

the storm surge, while the governor

hunkers behind hasty barricades

of banned books, and the Red Sox

might have to relocate for next

spring training. A certain president

floated the notion of nuking hurricanes

back out into open water. Hmm. And

there was also that business of beating

a virus back with bleach. In space,

no one can hear you tee off.

Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Lunch Ticket, RHINO, Salamander, and The Sun. He divides his time between Boston and Vermont. 

WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN WASHED AWAY

by Dustin Michael

The devastating tsunamis that struck the coastlines of Chile, Haiti, Indonesia, and Japan in recent decades produced waves tens of meters high, unimaginable to most people accustomed to gentle seas. But millions of years ago, a truly inconceivable set of waves—the tallest roughly 1,500 meters high—rammed through the Gulf of Mexico and spread throughout the ancient ocean, producing wave heights of several meters in distant waters, new simulations show. (Photo credit: Science Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo) —EOS, December 20, 2018

If there had been an Eiffel Tower,
an Empire State Building, a Great Pyramid,
One World Trade Center, a Statue of Liberty,
our house, our cars, and all the plates and dishes
from our wedding registry, our books, our children,
our children’s new dinosaur toys and my old dinosaur toys,
if there had been these things all stacked one on top of the other
like a mighty finger, they would point up to space, and to the terrible foam
of a still-much-taller wave.

If there had been human words to fail,
a rich tapestry of languages, a monomyth,
creation stories from every culture, all involving fire
and water, the name Enkidu in Sanskrit on a shard of pottery,
a diagram of the heroic cycle labeled fig. 2 in a student’s essay
about the earth-diver, the bones of Joseph Campbell
tumbling over and over in a tsunami that scrapes clean
all the bone beds, petroglyphs, an animated film on VHS about 
non-contemporaneous dinosaur friends on a dangerous journey,
drawer after drawer full of carefully labeled fossils all scattered,
all hit with the hose

If there had been a firebox containing the important papers,
passports, proof of citizenship, baptism certificates, bonds,
our homeowner’s insurance policy locating us in a flood zone,
topographical charts predicting sea level rise that the current administration
commissioned and then dismissed, the food and gas receipts from hurricane evacuations never submitted for a claim, fluttering away into a darkening sky like a thousand tiny lab coats

If there were a way to imagine a bullet from space
striking a planet of enormous birds, or to invent an instrument 
to measure emotions from plaster footprints made from casts of stone,
if there were a way to carbon date an animal’s scream and filter it
through a mile-high wave crossing the globe at close to the speed of sound,
or to photograph the world dying from our bedroom, I would reclaim these secrets from the quivering Earth for you and fall asleep with dirt from the backyard grave of our parakeet under my nails, tracing my finger along the crater
in your pillow where your face has pressed,
and discover a new layer of sediment there
composed entirely of thoughts
and prayers


Dustin Michael teaches writing and literature. He lives with his wife and children in Savannah, Georgia.

LUNAR IMPACT

by Martha Landman



Phil Plait writes on February 24, 2014 in Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog: “On Sept. 11, 2013, an asteroid hit the Moon. That happens all the time, but most of the cosmic debris is tiny, far too small to detect from the Earth. But this one was different. Roughly a meter across and moving at interplanetary speeds when it slammed into the lunar surface, it created the brightest explosion ever seen on the Moon! The whole thing was captured on video.”


Walking in the moonlight then,
we basked in that long afterglow,
our lips a molten mass, your face
a spectacular episode in the whiteness
of moon. At the sight of your silhouette
gliding in the water, desire dislodged
like lava, with the force of a fridge
hitting the moon; an asteroid
through a sea of clouds.

Through a sea of clouds
the moon gazed at us, her naked
eye a telescopic lens, her smile
a thermal glow. She moved at
elegant speed around the earth,
dodged and winked at every
meteor along the way.


Martha Landman writes dry poems in the wet season of tropical North Queensland, Australia.