Spacemanship

Sit at your biggest monitor. Resist—
don’t turn it on. If the computer wakes, 
unplug it. If you itch, if you’re distracted, 
if you hold grudges, if your frog won’t jump,

scratch, turn off your Wi-Fi and phone, hide 
your father’s portrait, and jump into the pond.

This is the only way to be lost in space. 
Space has neither doors nor bathrooms.
No interstellar octopus is coming to hug you. 
It’s night all day: watercolors, starbursts, 
Scorpius. The Big Dipper drips, the North 
Star drifts. Space is what you see and you’re 
seeing candy-colored circles and jelly beans.

Your circles are tiled, your jelly beans aligned 
and tiled like on memory chips. You long
for a frog that jumps but they’re bats you have. 
Their chirping is replacing your voice.
You no longer hear who you once were.

A star is frozen in explosion. Were it not 
light-years away you’d be nuked. You almost 
hear octopi shrieking. Your father’s making 
dinner. Steam tongues off his green florets.
The tapping of chopsticks is the conversation. 
You love that the two of you are spacemen 
and how the light-years understand.

Read more from Issue 21.2.