Voyage to Outer Space
By William Trowbridge
It used to fire up the imagination:
Trip to the Moon, Flash Gordon,
Star Trek, 2001: a Space Oddessy.
But after Armstrong's 'one small step,'
it's begun to look as if we're surrounded
by billions of vacant lots: the moon,
the nine planets, and Webb Telescope
notwithstanding, the cosmos, barren
as that acreage in the old Florida real estate
scam. Who would want to settle on
one of those year-round-hostile outbacks?
We do, developers say. Already, there's talk
of lunar hotels and anti-drift tethers
for zero-gravity sex. But maybe those lots
weren't always vacant. Maybe their inhabitants
did to their planet what we're doing to ours.
Maybe they've left a trail of mayhem
throughout the galaxy. Maybe we're them.
William Trowbridge’s ninth poetry collection, Call Me Fool, came out from Red Hen Press in 2022. Over 550 of his poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines and in more than 50 anthologies and textbooks. He is a faculty mentor in the University of Nebraska-Omaha Low-residency MFA in Writing Program and was Poet Laureate of Missouri from 2012 to 2016. For more information, see his website at williamtrowbridge.net.
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