This selection, chosen by guest editor JJ Rowan, is from Mom in Space by Lisa Ampleman (LSU Press 2024).
content warning for drowning
Water of Life
On a moon crater named for a sixteenth-century Jesuit astronomer, there’s a twelve-ounce-bottle’s worth of water spread through a cubic meter of soil, not enough to drink or drown in. An astronaut on a spacewalk felt water on the back of his head; a goldfish in a fishbowl, he lurched back to the airlock, globs of water covering his ears, eyes, nose, in danger of drowning 250 miles from any ocean. Swim class teaches babies to float until a parent can pluck them from the pool. Because bodies of water beckon. My cousin’s child was found face down in an in-ground, near the plastic pool he’d asked to play in. In church they get a silver cup of holy water over their heads, startle when it’s poured. We are bathed in the glory of God. Water rushed through three hundred feet of tubes in Luca Parmitano’s spacesuit to keep him from overheating, until some, blocked by a clogged filter, seeped into his air vent. A black hole galaxies away makes water by sucking in material, releasing energy waves that knock H and O together. In a children’s movie, a claymation Jesus stands in an unwatery river that folds around his robes. His jaw jerks as he reminisces about playing in the river with his cousin, then he dives underwater, suddenly animated cartoon, pausing beneath the surface as if he knows what will happen when he rises. Luca’s station-mates doffed his helmet, wiped more than a liter of water from his face with towels. Exposed to vacuum, water vented into space wouldn’t freeze at first; it would boil away, evaporating into a crystal mist. God’s dome separated the water below from the water above, and He called the dome sky. The water above the firmament is, of course, a mirage, just waves of light scattered by gas molecules. The water below has enough give to cushion the blow of a NASA capsule splashing down from the heavens, enough tension to keep it from sinking.
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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