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3 Poems by Nate Maxson

Nate Maxson

Rocket Ship Mural
Image credit: False Positives / CC BY

Rocket Science

We used to send monkeys

Ahead of human test subjects

Brief astronauts to test the water, blow on the soup before swallowing

Into the substance: an evolving arrow with sudden green buds/ atremble

Not from the sky, no

But through it, a sub-audible whistling not for our ears

Animals across the horizon, down below it’s summer with no preparation

The shattering of windows (canaries of the sound barrier) precedes the actual impact

Has that ever struck you as odd?

An object falls from the sky, as it was meant to be

As if it thought it was the first to escape

Downright comforting though

Compared to what happens when it vanishes before detonation leaving only shattered glass

Nobody knows

Where they go, these iron causalities

And (just between you and me)

Most civilians don’t know the difference

They may as well be ghosts

To be safe, clean and cost-effective

Nowdays it’s rockets and children first

Headfirst into the future

Because firing one backwards takes a lot more effort and we just don’t have those kinds of
resources these days

Still, there’s that mosquito-pitched air raid siren that hums: someone has/ someone has

So for the sake of stability we memorize in catalogues the bodies of Orpheus and Lot’s wives
(only one of whom had a name)

And we need the ripe human machine, always moving ahead

Plucked gently from the rodeo, never looking behind

Where every clown is a winner

Slow talkers need not apply

Someone has/ someone has, not I said the pilot

It is assumed that the origin point is the Trinity Site

But what if the trajectory goes back farther?

Patient zero frequently renamed, reassigned

Patients One (maiden name zero) and beyond are fuel for rumors and nutrient-rich, black
garden soil

Anything will grow

Between wished-upon falling satellites

Anything at all (even wooden horses)

Just be sure to buckle up/ the indicator light has come on meaning there is no more smoking
allowed in the restrooms

Because time is fickle, a fickle liquid

And these are shallow days

Public swimming pools too crowded to swim

Antiseptic/ half naked

In a nearby highrise apartment: Eurydice plays cards with Medusa not looking up from her hand
but unsure if she should be afraid/ if an ending is predetermined, may as well make it strip
poker

Someone has dared/ loose a rocket into the substance: fire is always a breached birth

There’s a science to landing on your feet but that is not our science, against the limit of sound
and light you can live in a year longer than it actually exists but be prepared for that familiar
whistling: incoming

Look at them/ looking up/ at us looking down: closer/ someone has dared

In the beginning we would send dogs

A Volunteer

Someone say yes before I float away

Before they let me be an astronaut/ say yes before they do/ I’m demanding a witchdoctor to be
present at my last meal/ because I keep writing letters to NASA and eventually they’re going to
break and say yes first/ someone to either wave away the smoke or spin it into pleasing shapes

I tell them again and again that I’m 25 years old and I’m going to live forever/ if I go up there,
mortality is down here but up there/ they have most wonderful floatation devices in space/ I
part ways with science, play devil’s advocate by pointing out mechanical innovation as potential
evidence for creative design

As punishment for my big mouth (and because I asked for it) they’ll put me in a spacesuit and
tie me to a chair sitting on a pile of a thousand fireworks in the middle of the prairie/ childhood
home of abandoned trailers and pastures where the cows eat weeds growing from their own
feces/ infinite fuel or at least enough to achieve escape velocity

And if I survive the atmosphere (which I will) I’ll be expected to send smoke signals even though
things don’t burn so easy out in space (so you see why I need a tutor) and to take photographs
with an old automatic Kodak camera and developing them in gamma rays/ not a soldier but an
escapee even now/ there is a vast alarm clock in the center of the galaxy/ I’ve seen it

The worst part is that I’m going to survive/ I should believe in the miraculous given how many
times I’ve jumped and just dusted myself off and slinked back home/ up there I’m going to live
forever/ the subconscious resides in the gut, like bacteria

Alright, probably not totally forever (I’m past that delusion, however convincing it might be) but
a long time, a very long time/ not starving but getting hungrier and hungrier

I’ve dreamed my ignition like a car accident/ slow motion impact, striking the match on
scrubland/ a straw of it between my teeth under dark glass (golden remnant)

Or the death of an acquaintance/ not someone close but not too far away either/ a distant blue
dot, my old friend/ if they’d never shown me that picture from the moon, that picture from a satellite

I’d not have thrown a pebble rippling outwards/ unconnected singularities add up like beautiful
people all getting the same tattoo/ all the hoofed animals at a watering hole lift their heads for
a moment

Someone/ Houston/ the upholsterers/ those in orbit, those with horns and those camouflaged
in the rainy season

Deciding as a group without any words spoken/ whether to run or keep drinking the brown
water/ on some far off planet/ somewhere warm in the sunshine and cold in the dark

Someone, anyone/ pyromaniac or engineer engaged in a parasitic cycle

Before I learn/ before I tease the miraculous again like a lion in an accidentally unlocked cage/
eyes golden in a place with no oxygen and his footprints sound like drums

Someone/ I’ll need a volunteer from the audience/ anyone with steady hands
Say yes before I learn to swim

Preemptive Strike

A crack appears in the machinery

Quiet unlit wound

A break in the façade

Disproving infallibility once and for all

Like a curtain opening on the magician early

And yet

It is there

Spread open over gears and wires like something coming out of the sky

A crack appeared in the machinery, a bluebird began to sing

And then stopped

Like electricity

Even devotion has its limits

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Nate Maxson

Nate Maxson is a writer and performance artist. The author of several collections of poetry, he lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Author: Nate Maxson Tags: poetry Category: Poetry September 8, 2014

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Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

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