LIPSTICK

by Mary K O’Melveny

Col. Wang Yaping is a pilot in the People’s Liberation Army’s Air Force. She is a space veteran, now making her second trip into orbit. She is set in the coming weeks to be the first Chinese woman to walk in space as China’s space station glides around Earth at 17,100 miles per hour. And yet, as she began a six-month mission last week at the core of China’s ambitious space program, official and news media attention fixated as much on the comparative physiology of men and women, menstruation cycles, and the 5-year-old daughter she has left behind, as they did on her accomplishments. (No one asked about the children of her two male colleagues.) Shortly before the launch, Pang Zhihao, an official with the China National Space Administration, let it be known that a cargo capsule had supplied the orbiting space station with sanitary napkins and cosmetics. “Female astronauts may be in better condition after putting on makeup,” he said in remarks shown on CCTV, the state television network. Photo: Col. Wang Yaping, center, with Col. Ye Guangfu, left, and Maj. Gen. Zhai Zhigang at a pre-launch ceremony on Oct. 15 at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China. Credit: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images —The New York Times, October 23, 2021

If one puts lipstick on an astronaut,

can she still blaze through arid

atmospheres, dangle wildly from a line 

that tethers her to the mothership 

even as she kicks up her heels 

and pirouettes out into star space?

 

It seems makeup is a juggernaut 

that enhances our reality. Some added

emphasis, a glowing image to re-define

a star-struck traveler, to make her trip

seem normal, like any mom who feels

a need to exit might arguably face.

 

There is nothing to be feared. We ought

to be glad some girl wearing a padded

suit has figured out she can still shine, 

even if she must give her family the slip.

Perhaps pancake isn’t so perfidious, but conceals

a dream or two that she might still embrace.

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020. Her latest poetry collection Dispatches From The Memory Care Museum has just been published by Kelsay Books.  

SPILLED WATERCOLORS

by Diane Elayne Dees

Tweeted by NASA astronaut Jessica Meir from the International Space Station.

From space, the aqua, cream, azure, and cerulean
appear as if blended by a master painter
with an eye for serenity and expansion. I imagine
a second painting, this one bright, yet soft,
with puffs of spoonbill pink and splashes
of sea turtle green streaked across a peaceful
background of bunting indigo. From space,
the Louisiana delta is an impressionist’s dream
of water and feathers and the reflections
of a stippled sky. Up close, the picture tears
at the edges as the coastline rapidly recedes.
The Rusty Blackbird, black bear and Great Blue
fade behind a foreground of erosion and loss.
From space, the watercolors spill a dream-like
beauty onto a canvas teeming with life,
while the landscape shifts precariously,
altering the perspective forever.

Diane Elayne Dees has two chapbooks forthcoming. Her microchap Beach Days is available for download and folding from Origami Poems Project. Diane also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world.

FOURTH ASTRONAUT

by Rick Mullin

Painting by Alan Bean, the fourth astronaut (Apollo 12) to have walked on the moon. He died on May 26, 2018. 

“I think of myself not as an astronaut who paints,
 but as an artist who was once an astronaut” —Alan Bean, Apollo


His name connoting photosynthesis
in pods on earth, he traveled to the moon
and stood in fields of cobalt dust and darkness.
No one saw it in his way—the dune
of oxidates, the earthrise glinting fire
on the helmet of his mate. The silent night.
He gathered specimens of stone and scraps
of wreckage from an unmanned satellite.
He worked for seven hours, drawing maps
in his imagination to a higher
landscape in a timeless super 8
depicting the recurrent astral mystery.
The dream. While others met a common fate
in business, he resolved on painting history,
unpacking samples to a canvas of desire.

Rick Mullin's newest poetry collection is Transom.