Have you ever wondered about all those kids who were fascinated by astronomy but never encouraged to study it? Maybe they were girls. Maybe they were me. Maybe they found their backdoor to the heavens through mythology. Maybe they found their way to the stars later in life, on their own. Maybe they didn’t.

Here’s a poem by my friend Melissa. I love this one. It was published at SWWIM last month. Tomorrow I’ll post one of my poems that I’m reminded of when I read this one of hers.

If You Wondered About the Astronaut Who Never Went to Space
after Luisa Muradyan

This isn’t a motivational poem.
I’m just a woman doing dishes on a Tuesday.
I swirl the soap like Andromeda and count
the stars on the plate, imagining they’re suds.
The sky turns golden in the evening
and I remember nebulas I never saw,
their gleaming clouds a birthplace,
my daughter never born. Pencils
are rocket-shaped and I sort them
by color — yellow, fuchsia, turquoise,
Io, Europa, Ganymede. Wipe the rings
off the table. I can’t listen
to Holst and his Planets anymore,
the horns announcing Jupiter or Neptune.
Why does he leave one out, the only one I know well —
my meteor feet landing here and staying
since the day I was born?

***

Melissa McEver Huckabay is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Texas State University. Her work has appeared in Poetry South, Defunkt, Porter House Review, and elsewhere, and her short fiction has won the Spider’s Web Flash Fiction Prize from Spider Road Press. She lives in central Texas with her husband, son, and two affectionate cats.