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?

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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.