The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Mom in Space by Lisa Ampleman

This selection, chosen by guest editor JJ Rowan, is from Mom in Space by Lisa Ampleman (LSU Press 2024).

Try Staying Home (excerpt)

                If you think going to the Moon is hard,
                try staying home.
                                —Barbara Cernan, wife of astronaut Gene Cernan

Kristin Fisher (November 1984)

Astro-tot Kristin is startled as her grandmother shrieks.
Just fourteen months old, she doesn’t understand
that the light-blue jumpsuit she’s wearing
is official NASA fabric, the bright nonstar
striding across the Houston night sky
is a Shuttle holding her mother, 180 miles up.
She knows her father is holding her, that it’s dark,
that the lake is sloshing under their dock.

Her mother, Anna, first mom in space,
has zipped herself into a sleeping pack
hanging from the wall. She doesn’t
know what to do with her head
without a pillow. She still feels addled
from the vestibular weirdness of microgravity.
Tomorrow she’ll frisbee-toss a satellite into space
using a robotic arm.

“How does operating the arm make you
a better mother?” a reporter asked before the flight.
“Oh, I don’t think it did,” she replied.

Kristin will write about her grandmother’s
screaming—that unsettling sound—
her mother’s celestial gallivanting,
as her first memory. “Well, that’s really nice,
Kristin,” the teacher will say, “but
you’re supposed to tell a true memory.”

Lisa Ampleman is the author of the poetry collections Full Cry and Romances. She is the managing editor of the Cincinnati Review and the poetry series editor at Acre Books.

JJ Rowan is a queer nonbinary poet and dancer whose writing and movement practices have developed largely out of collaborative approaches and the pursuit of deep connection. They are looking for the places where the written line and the lines of the moving body intersect, where genre blurs and remixes and reboots, and where style and role reach maximum fluidity and deeper capacity. Their chapbook, a simple verb, is available from Bloof Books. You can follow their handwriting and movement projects on Instagram.