Astronaut

No wonder your plushest muscles

are for sucking, moon-cheeked child,

but what your mouth demands

is too much a miracle: milk 

from the upturned tip of the little finger

I offer as consolation prize, to zero a need

more bone-deep than hunger.

Now that you’ve jumped ship

each umbilicus we rig is makeshift.

Still you nuzzle and tug nonstop

as if you would wind in the line between us,

regain the subterranean vault of your making,

before hunger, before the cry,

clean of shape or shock of distances.

Less baby than stone

in a lightless river, there you tumbled

effortfully in dumb headwaters,

coursing, rocked, salt-scrubbed 

to the veined translucence of moonstone,

your mother unbeknownst to you

even as she fashioned the stone and the river.

We pictured you a voyager, attuned

to the chiming of a single bloodbound sphere,

made fragile by great altitude as you slipped ghostlit

along the furthest boundary of the map,

breathless and finned like the earliest vertebrates,

a fighter pilot chosen from scores of the driven

for the fearless purity of your desires.

Tossed to dry land now, cut adrift,

your rockets split, you nurse an ache

you cannot now nor ever name

for the quiet you stumbled from,

its irretrievable flavor—

was it blue plums,

was it sex, was it breath after running

steeply uphill then suddenly stopping?—

once delivered without stint

or payment through your carmine tether.

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Mary Fontana

Mary Fontana grew up in central Washington state and trained as a malaria immunologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Seneca Review, The Seattle Review, Crab Creek Review, Rust + Moth, Kestrel, SWWIM Everyday, Moss, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.