ONE BIG GULP

by Barbara Simmons

Watching it disappear, 
this planet gobbled up
by something so much smaller,
the very star it circled swallowed it,
reminds me of that ancient feeling, 
vanishing into another,
brought into being by my insecurity,
my inability to feel complete unless
submerged, immersed, subsumed
into another’s orbit.
 
Those days are gone, my learning
not to be absorbed so fully that
I’d lose myself in someone else’s space.
It’s taken time, not fifteen thousand years
astronomers are saying it took 
the star to nibble up its planet, though
decades in my earthly life I often 
count as infinite.
 
What I have learned the planets must:
circle stars more safely, 
spend time while wheeling 
looking back and in,
insuring you understand
both apogee and perigee, 
assuring you’ll be fine
both with, without, and by yourself.
 
Nothing’s as dark as orbiting gone awry,
nothing as lonely as losing who and where you are.

Barbara Simmons grew up in Boston, resides in California—both coasts inform her poetry. A graduate of Wellesley College, she received an MA in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins, and an MA in Education and Counseling from Santa Clara University. A retired educator, she continues to savor life and language, exploring words as ways to remember, envision, celebrate, mourn, and try to understand. Publications have included Boston Accent, The NewVerse News, Topical Poetry, DoubleSpeak, Soul-Lit, 300 Days of Sun, Capsule Stories – Summer Edition, Swimming, Journal of  Expressive Writing,  and her recently published book Offertories: Exclamations and Disequilibriums from Friesen Press.

CONSIDER THE COMET

by Sally Zakariya

Some night a lucky few of us may spot
a comet poised in the northern sky,
its large body of dust and ice flaring
out behind it, trailing packets of light
we see as green.

They call it Comet C/2022 E3,
a mouthful of a name, and it hasn’t
come by for fifty thousand years,
cruising its elliptical orbit around
the sun in its own good time.

I read somewhere that life is held
together with imprecise words
and inexact thoughts, but
scientists seem pretty precise,
pretty exact, about this comet.

Or maybe it’s just life down here 
on earth that we ponder inexactly, 
imprecisely.

Maybe it’s just our worldly trials 
and tribulations that we approach 
guardedly, side-eyed, warily,
so much this, so little that.

Who can know what’s coming?

Perhaps it’s different for comets.
At any rate, unless its giant orbit 
takes it beyond our solar system, 
we can welcome old C/2022 again
fifty thousand years from now.

Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 100 publications and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her publications include Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, and When You Escape. She edited and designed a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table, and blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.  

THE CROWD ISN'T BOOING—THEY'RE SCREAMING "LOOOOOOOOU"

by Flavian Mark Lupinetti

Good idea, Sweet Lou. 

No need to nuke the moon. 

Just… scooch it over a little. 

Like you said, make it travel 

in a slightly bigger circle. 

Or a slightly smaller one, 

whatever, let the Forest Service 

guys figure it out. 

Oh, I know you know it’s an ellipse. 

Just… adjust it. 

The foresters have the know-how, 

not to mention a whole lot of 

picks and shovels, right? 

Sure, you could ask NASA 

to do the job with rockets. 

But I see what you’re after. 

Change the moon’s orbit, 

but do it in an artisanal way. 

Flavian Mark Lupinetti, a writer and cardiac surgeon, received his MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.  His fiction and poetry have appeared in About Place, Barrelhouse, Bellevue Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Review, Briar Cliff Review, Cutthroat, The Examined Life, Neon, PROEM, Weber—The Contemporary West, and ZYZZYVA. 

2020 CD3: ODE TO THE NEW MOON AND MY OLD COLLEGE ROOMMATE

by Susan Barry-Schulz




The earth has a new moon—it’s only temporary—roughly
the size of the orange Volkswagen Beetle you tried
to teach me to drive
until we ended up incapacitated
by laughter, backed up down a steep incline,
inching closer and closer to someone’s
front door, the Bronx being a tough place
to learn to shift gears.

The tug of other beings—the sun,
the primary moon—will inevitably pull
this mini-moon from its unstable orbit,
as was with us—flung— far from each other
toward new loves—big skies, mountain peaks—rock walls,
river towns—we drifted a bit over time—and space—
reconnecting again
when the tides went out.

When I picture us now as the Earth’s new moon
I see us at twenty—
that orange bug stocked with Salem Lights
and Diet Coke and our radiant bodies— you
strong enough to rope a calf and shoot a bear
and me—I don’t know what the hell I was good for,
really—but I could run for miles and make you laugh—
whizzing weightless along the trajectory
singing along to that Bruce Hornsby tape
still stuck in the cassette player
            the song came and went
            like the time that we spent
looking through the windshield at the whole
swirly blue-green earth before us
as if it was ours—

then showing up
three years later on a screen in a NASA lab
outside Tuscon Arizona—an unexpected flash—just a few pixels,
really, but enough to get the researchers’ hearts
beating a little faster
as we appear again and again—a tiny blip
against a fixed background,
still flying high—
while astronomers
across the world scramble to predict—they have ways
of graphing these things—

the path of our escape.

Susan Barry-Schulz is a Physical Therapist and Tai Chi instructor. Her poetry has appeared in The Five-Two, The Wild Word, Minute Magazine, SWWIM, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Shooter Literary Magazine, Dream Well Publishing’s One Hundred Memories Anthology and most recently in South Florida Poetry Journal. She is a member of the Hudson Valley Writer's Center and lives in a lake neighborhood in Putnam County, NY with her husband and one or more of her 3 adult children. It all depends.

THE SPACE ROADSTER

by Martin Elster

Even Elon Musk, engineer of the circus show, was surprised that his audacious stunt worked. “Apparently, there is a car in orbit around Earth,” he tweeted. His plan is for the $100,000 Tesla Roadster—with the message “Don’t panic!” stamped on the dashboard and David Bowie playing on the speakers—to cruise through high-energy radiation belts that circuit Earth towards deep space. —The Guardian, February 7, 2018

Elon, you’ve lost one of your cherry cars.
We doubt you miss it, though, for Starman steers it,
piercing the emptiness en route to Mars
and the ring of rocks beyond. What flyer fears it,

the absolute of space? Not this fake pilot!
Its gaze is black as the gaps between the stars,
and yet the worlds and suns seem to beguile it.
Who would have thought that dummies in red cars

could zip into earth orbit and keep going?
They flabbergasted us, your booster rockets
which settled like a pair of sparrows (owing
to bang-up engineering). In your pockets

were all the funds you needed for a test
that bested your most hopeful expectations.
Now car and mannequin are on a quest
to beat our wildest visualizations

as earth recedes with all its blues and whites
as Mars grows closer with its browns and coppers
as space becomes spectacular with lights
as we audacious apes become star-hoppers.


Martin Elster is a composer and serves as percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poetry has appeared in Astropoetica, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Chimaera, and The Road Not Taken, among others, and in anthologies such as Taking Turns: Sonnets from Eratosphere, The 2012 and 2015 Rhysling Anthologies, New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan, and Poems for a Liminal Age.