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.
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.
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