Somewhere on the moon last night, Neil Armstrong came back to life and was standing in the middle of the Sea of Tranquility in complete darkness.  His frail, decaying hands that were no doubt filled with formaldehyde, held a rather large and sure-to-be extremely heavy boombox that loomed up and over his head, blasting “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on repeat.  He said that it crossed his mind more than once to replace the six faded white American Flags with the stereo, but ultimately decided against it.


In mythology, bleeding is considered to be a feminine attribute:  
                                     “I bleed, therefore I am.” 
(But this is also the downfall of a version of feminism that is not intersecular.)  ((Your lunar cycle does not necessarily need to function in order to be considered a woman.))  (((I am not sure of which, if any, version of feminism Neil Armstrong subscribed to.)))

                                                ­              ­                            When a woman is bleeding, they say that she is at the height of her power; she is aligned with the tides and the cosmos.  She is celestial.  Blood is sacred,
eternal—the very essence of our beings—
                                                ­        ­      ­             but if the Blood Moon was
                                                ­                  really just the moon on her period,
what could she do last night she could do at no other point in her life?  
Where was her power?  She was isolated,
                                                                ­              forgotten by the sun,
                                           hidden away inside the umbra of the earth.  

(Which is the part where the masculine power of the sun rejected the most important feminine attribute of the moon.)


Michael Collins flew solo around the moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin played with dust and rocks.  For 48 minutes he was completely alone, radio silenced behind the shadow, and he thought about death and being the last man standing from Apollo 11.


Inside Neil Armstrong’s speakers, Bonnie Tyler was crooning that
                      “your love is like a shadow on me all of the time,”
and I have not yet decided if this is                      
                                                                ­       good      or      bad.  
Instead, I am wondering if Buzz Aldrin feels sore for
eternally being second best?  Or if he still thinks that the view from the
moon is still one of “magnificent desolation?”  And
does he feel this way about all three of his ex-wives?  
Do they know that the moon was his first love?


We name missions to the moon, to
Luna’s surface, to Diana’s territory, after a
Greek and Roman god of the sun, when
                                                            ­          wolves howl to the goddess
                                                         ­                              instead.

You were born in the cold black heart of the Cold War, under the fist of
Eisenhower, under the satellite eye of Mother Russia—1960 America.
Chinese Year of the Rat.  U-2 Pilot Gary Powers forgot to **** himself.

Space Race Baby looking up at stars she does not comprehend—
the world is big, the sky is bigger—Shhhhhhhhhhh: huddle under your desk in case a big, black, bomb falls down and burns you so bad you feel nothing but cold  
             cold         cold;

huddle inside yourself in case your plane is shot down over Soviet soil
and everything turns to red, turns to blood, turns to your fingers shaking and your eyes stinging, and you think about that time when your mother told you about the Year of the Rat being associated with white,

with the Chinese color of death.  You think: This is it.  There is where it ends,
but this is not it; this is not the end.  You will die in a hospital bed
in 49 years, so just give it some time, alright?
Khrushchev and Eisenhower can play Tug-of-War and
                                   Vietnam can burn in the meantime.

Mother, when you were born you could not breathe.  Mother,
when you died it was because you could not breathe.  Mother,
when you are not here I think of Gary Powers not having time to press “Self-Destruct,” of the Year of the Rat
                                                                ­      choking to death on
                                                              ­         Lily  of  the  Valley,

of learning how to talk to the 58,286 dead Vietnam War soldiers. I want to
know what it is like to look up at the sky and fear a missile strike smack in
the middle of winter. I want to know how cold the Cold War felt to you in
the Chinese Year of the Rat, and what he felt when U-2 Pilot Gary Powers
fell like
                     Lucifer
                into the arms
            of Mother Russia.

1969 Cult Mentality: Charles Manson
is asking you to “leave a sign… something witchy” at the scene of the
crime.  You listen because you believe he is Jesus.  You smear the word
                                                                ­                           “Pig” across the door.

1978 Cult Mentality: Jim Jones
is asking you to drink grape Kool-Aid infused with cyanide.  You do this
because you have been convinced that he is “Christ the Revolution.” You
                                 inject your child with the toxin before gulping it down.

1997 Cult Mentality: Marshall Applewhite*
is asking you to tie a plastic bag around your head after you consume a mixture of phenobarbital, applesauce, and *****.  You do this because you believe dying will take you to the spacecraft flying behind
Comet Hale-Bopp.  You make sure you have a
five dollar bill and three quarters
                                                         in your pocket for the interplanetary toll.

[NEW]
Scientists know more about the
                 moon
           than the ocean.

[WAXING CRESCENT]
Light can only dive 200 meters
            down into the ocean.  Below it,
the “Midnight Zone” glows in the dark.  
(By standing in your shadow,
I am hoping to become
                                         bioluminescent.)

[FIRST QUARTER]
Life has a tendency to thrive in hostile environments.  
                                                 ­                        For this reason, Jupiter’s moon,
                                                           ­              Europa, may be able to support
                                                                ­         life within the global ocean of
                                                              ­           liquid water that is hidden
                                                          ­               beneath the ice at its surface.
(This is why I am able to bloom in the dark.)

[WAXING GIBBOUS]
The ocean bows to no one but the moon.  Turn
off the lights.  Turn up the stars.  Low tide wants to
fold back inside itself and lap against the
                             shores of the Sea of Tranquility.  
High tide just wants to be noticed.

[FULL]
But a heated black body sunspot,
                (isolated from the rest
                of the photosphere),
still shines brighter than the moon.  Wolves should
be howling at the sun instead.

venus
morning star
lucifer  f a
                  l
                     l
                       i
                          n
                             g    backwards and forwards in time
                                                            ­                    in rotation
                                                        ­                        in retrograde rotation

(“the fall of lucifer” painted darkly against the bright spot in the sky)
                                                                ­                         ((i see myself in the
                                                                ­                             shadows beneath
                                                                ­                       his tumbling figure))

light-bringer
dawn-bringer
the rising sun in the east
a supernova exploding in the background: there are subatomic particles
bigger than what i can offer
                                                           ­       there are greenhouse gasses that
                                                                  give off more heat than my body
                                                      will ever be able to produce for anyone

day light
night light
the setting sun in the west
a constellational birth in the foreground: there are
not enough moons in the solar system
                                                          ­           there is not enough space
                                                      between planetary rings to explain        
                                                          gravitation and the human body

(aphrodite tell me: is this sin or is this love?)  
                                                                     ((i will dip my toes in sea foam
                                                                ­                             until i deteriorate
                                                     ­     i will put my ear against conch shells
                                                                ­       until i can hear your answer))

venus
evening star
lucifer pouring sulfuric acid into the car vents
                                                           the air ducts
                                                           the atmosphere
it becomes the thick dark clouds that obscure
my vision of      myself      from      reality

I was driving to work tonight and I almost swerved off the road because I was staring at Orion's Belt as it hung near the horizon of the sky.

Please study the following photo and connect the dots on Orion, his belt, and his arrow:
(A detailed answer will be on the back for comparison)

I do not pretend to understand astrology nor astronomy.  

Orion’s arrow always points north.  You can use it as a compass if you are traveling somewhere where there are not many signs of light.  In October, if you crane your neck and squint your eyes and maybe pray to God, Orion will shoot arrow after arrow off into the sky and you will be able to make your first wish upon a shooting star.  (If you are in a desert, and that is why you are navigating by constellations, pray for help.)

His belt is made up of three sisters and I wonder if they talk to him in the night and keep him company?

(Is it possible to be up in the Heavens, overlooking the world, while still feeling lonely and insignificant?)

Constellations move minutely every year.  In this way, they are similar to humans.  Always roaming.  Always looking for change.

When Orion boasted that he could **** any living animal on the planet, Gaia, the Earth Goddess, objected and sent a scorpion after him.  After his death, Zeus flung his body into the stars; fractured to pieces, glowing softly in the night sky, Orion continues to hunt his prey into the dark, cold depths of the Milky Way.

Maybe, if you prayed to the Greek Gods, you could find yourself breathing in the stars, too.

They don’t put dead bodies in the wall anymore.  They put them in those walk-in coolers that they use in food service and they stay in there until the funeral home or the autopsy people come in and wheel them out and do whatever it is that they do.  But what happens if the cooler fills up and another patient dies—where do they go?  Outside of the cooler?  In the hall outside the morgue?  Left in the hospital room until there is an open space for them in the walk-in?  Or are they just not allowed to die in the first place?

Place a check mark next to the option that makes you the most uncomfortable:
• when dead bodies are still warm and growing lukewarm
• when dead bodies are ice cold.

You can survive two weeks on a ventilator before there is an increased risk of illness.  

Eula Biss writes that she does not believe that absolutely no pain is possible, that the zero on the pain scale is null and void.  I would like to say that I agree with her, but I have this stupid sliver of hope where I believe that towards the end of it all, everything will be everything and everything will be nothing at all.  I guess what I’m saying is that I would like to believe that when you are dying, you are a zero on the pain scale, but by that point in time, I supposed it doesn’t really matter anyway.

There is a strange, numb void that occurs when someone you love dies, but I am not sure if this could be rated as a zero or a ten on the pain scale.  Getting ****** into a black hole could either hurt very much or not at all.

The medulla oblongata, located as a portion of the brainstem, is the part of the nervous system that controls both cardiac and respiratory mechanisms.  If severe damage occurs to this center, death is imminent.  

After one minute of not breathing brain cells begin to die.
After three minutes of not breathing, serious brain damage is likely.
Ten minutes: many brain cells will be dead, full patient recovery is unlikely.
Fifteen minutes: patient recovery is virtually impossible.

A “thunderclap headache.”  A cerebral aneurysm that has ruptured.  A subarachnoid hemorrhage pushing blood and fluid down on my mother’s brain.  Grade five: deep coma, rigid decerebration, 10% chance of survival.  

In some hospitals, if a loved one has passed, the caregivers cut off several small locks of the patient’s hair, tie them up with a ribbon, and put them in little pink mesh bags for each member of the family as some sort of morbid memento.  They take the dead person’s hand, place it on an ink pad, and then stamp it to a piece of paper that has some sort of sappy and sorry poem typed up on it.  I do not know where we put the paper, but my little mesh bag is still on my bedside table.  Somewhere.  

They put dead bodies in white body bags.