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).

Belated Valentine with Geology and Physics

Love you like bedrock, our city’s
                limestone & shale alternating,
born from prehistoric shallow seas
                & deltas, city where I met you, where
on good days synovial fluid with
                enough pressure

keeps my arthritic joints from
                aching. Love you like
docking latches, pneumatic system
                powered by nitrogen, holding
space modules together; like the deep
                dark vacuum outside

atmosphere, encompassing, the sheer
                cliffs of our geography,
late evidence of the glacier
                that pushed debris ahead of it
as it advanced, Paleozoic disaster
                that now affords invigorating
river views. Love you for

the myths you counter when
                we watch action movies:
an electromagnetic pulse would not
                turn off a city’s lights.
A bullet cannot explode a gas tank.
                Love you like gravitational

waves, a distant catastrophe rippling our
                planet but all the diurnal
fiddle-faddle continuing: intermittent
                Weedwacker, honey too viscous
to cook with, child chortling in
                the other room as we share
the minutiae of the past few hours.

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.