Zinnias by Sarah Fawn Montgomery

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They did not know—the first

flowers in space, planted by a hand

years removed from another, already

the bones losing mass, density

another word for dependent,

the way oblong seeds in orbit

will not grow without prayer

and a light source that pretends

to be the sun and how the son

missed his mother long dead

like the icebergs simply giving 

up, slipping silent into the sea,

the coasts burning away like fuel

from a rocket to anywhere better

than a place that grows garbage

in an ocean patch, crops a cruelty

like absent rain or the funnels

that formed, tethered like a noose

to the earth he mourned

from the porthole, goodbye

a priority best not practiced, mission 

controlled by a billionaire who wants

to buy his way to bloom

in barren places, space a sowing

field, success an orange star

opening under breathless watch,

recorded before abandoned 

out the airlock with a man

to shoot across the emptiness.

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Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (forthcoming Split/Lip Press, 2022), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Assistant Professor at Bridgewater State University. You can follow her on Twitter at @SF_Montgomery

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20 June 2022