Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

Post-Dated Love Note on the Doomsday Planetary Alignment:
5 May 2000 
Ash Bowen

“. . . with all of the planets aligned on one side of the solar system, astrophysicists feared the gravitational pull would snap Earth’s axis and send the planet careening into outer space.”

—Dr. Hans Craig, NASA

When they claimed it’d be like Earth had never been—
us catapulted across the blinking map
of satellites, spun down in a noose of doom—

I wanted only you to barrel-roll
with me across the blazy swirl of stars.
And if it’d been like Earth had never been,

we’d lost our grip on gravity together,
gone ass-over-elbow when things went tilt.
The satellites spun down their news of doom

and I imagined us as just another
set of heavenly bodies spooning through
the universe. The Earth had never been

so useless as it would’ve been right then—
us hovering in lusty weightlessness
while satellites spun down more news of doom.

When they claimed it’d be like Earth had never been
and satellites spun down their news of doom
we would’ve been the greatest constellations
to ever swing from lines of glittered starshine.

 

Ash Bowen's poems have appeared in New England Review, Crab Orchard Review, Black Warrior Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. He is co-managing editor of Linebreak and co-edited Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Literature, the world's first e-book-only anthology of contemporary poetry. This marks his second appearance in Pebble Lake Review. His manuscript is making the rounds.