ex gf moon landing
okay so naturally you were commander
neil armstrong. i was buzz.
it’s the 80s now. the moon is long gone.
some souvenir rocks are safe at nasa.
it’s 2012 now. neil, man, you died.
it was your heart of course.
so your wife finally came clean.
it’s her time now, maybe a book deal.
call the national enquirer!
call the sun! tell them!
the apollo program.
a hollywood hoax. stanley kubrik
does excellent adaptations.
your name is michael collins
and you’re still alive, but
neil armstrong was
a better name, a man’s man name,
even has the word strong.
michael collins is a plain name
the one in the story who never
got to walk on the moon
even after traveling all that way.
he hung back in the space taxi. of course
buzz is my real name. the rocket
sounds our bodies made.
i guess i should have known
neil, you were just as real
as that moon mission.
it was critical
to beat the russians.
Landscape of an Apartment Rental
My reflections stream from ceiling to floor
an ocean gyre spins the dishes of clothes.
I wash myself in white rapids and foam,
sing of old trees peeled from antique stores.
Instead of owls in the cabinets,
trinkets for the crows.
I summon twelve stark suns,
call both the dusk and dawn,
fasten time to a film reel
at half and double speeds.
The springtime creatures frolic in the mirage that hangs
from a gypsum wall and I can shut them out
as with the stars. What is left—
me and my dog,
two lazy hogs who sleep all day
on the cotton mountain dropped in this place
by the Black skin in my blood
whose hands hold us.
Then we were dynamos.
Now we are lost in the heath.
Jessica Rowshandel (they/them) is a nonbinary Afro-Taíno Puerto Rican + Persian writer, visual artist, and musician. Their creative writing has been published in HiConcept Magazine, Epiphanies and Late Realizations of Love, Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs, and Mid-Level Management Literary Magazine. For more information please visit jessicarowshandel.com. Twitter: @JRowshandel.