this is an old one

[rowens]

This is one of the first I sent off and got rejected about 20 years ago. Well, at least 15.


                             Living On the Moon
 
 
People get upset, thinking if we hadn't cut so
            much of the budget for the
space program
we'd have people living on the moon by now.
 
My astrology has been screwed
            since those cretins
stuck a flagpole
and pranced around like fairies on my guiding planet,
 
now I imagine looking into the sky at night
            catching a glimpse of the mystic moon
thinking about some jerk
screwing a beautiful woman in the thirdwheel shadow of this dying
                                                             globe.

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this is actually wrong.

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I posted the wrong one. I sent this Living on the Moon after this . . .

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                                       Subsequent Landings
 
 
Fireflies dance like wiccans at white masses,
millispurts circumspecting the middleground.
—Light like fire; but not quite. Old Dian in her
electricblanket, squeezing pus out of sunspots:
Her grandsons were born in the nineteen-eighties,
 
and she, queen of no ancient crust, goddess last
mentioned in some inconsequential rhyme, turns
over on a bed full of lightning bugs crushed
but for their last flashing breaths. Waning in that
cornerstone-covered cave, she waits to be her
own mother—

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I sent those two, but the second one first.