📃 Daily(ish) poem → 00346 ◊ Spacewalk ◊ Natalie Shapero
Spacewalk
Big deal, the solar system
is replete with rubble left over from its formation.
Join the club.
All my circulating garbage and nowhere
for it to go. I used to talk stuff out
with the dead, but now I can’t even
do that anymore. They stopped understanding
my references. They failed
to intuit tone. We are witnessing an age
of unprecedented divide
between this life and after; they only
want to be with their own.
I’d drown myself, but unfortunately
I can’t find the ocean, though it seems like just
a minute ago it was right here,
with its bread-knife fish and its
putty-knife fish and all its landed modules,
down from space.
Everybody, welcome home. I heard
they give each astronaut a pill
to end it all up there if needed. If the spacewalk
turns out bleakest.
Look around. You know what I want
to know. Do they get to keep it.
—Natalie Shapero
—found in Poetry Northwest (Winter & Spring 2024; Vol. XVIII, Iss. 2)