2017 Fall Contest Winner: 2nd Place, New Poets

Cosmonaut’s Lament

 

Above her head

the stars,

bleary in their watchfulness

 

Under her feet

black offal,

of metal tang and smoke and char

 

Contrails unspool like strands of hair in zero G

and the cosmonaut thinks of

earthbound tidepools

 

little pockets of life

where there should be no life

 

Of her sweetheart, unclasping

a locket notched at her throat

when she sees a burning line unzip the sky

 

Of her mother and father, looking

to the strafed horizon

from the empty boardwalk

 

Am I their Lucifer,

the Heavens lost,

falling down to an embered earth

 

Or their Icarus,

spine twisting,

fused emptying breath and breezes lack?

 

The cosmonaut enters the breach

and Earth swings up like a steady sword

from a golden myth

 

little pockets of life

where there should be no life

 

 

Genevieve DeGuzman was born in the Philippines, raised in Southern California, and graduated from Columbia University. Her fiction and poetry appear or are forthcoming in Indigo Lit, LONTAR, Liminality, Rising Phoenix Review, Switchback, and AJ (now Tablet), among others. She has been awarded a residency at Can Serrat and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Scroll to Top