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.