the moon’s a lost balloon
just hanging ’round to give
its touch of poignancy
to another featureless night;
the sun’s hell-bent on fun,
burned out by another day,
leaving us in the dark to play
our next hopeless home game;
our one and only superstar
almost saves the day,
carrying the team through
another acceptable loss;
the stars are mason jars
of summer lightning bugs,
twinkling for the sake of twinkling,
a wonder from where we sit—
on an isolated spit
of an ocean planet,
a galactic backwater,
where somewhere there’s
a dreamer, looking up
and wondering if time
is but a nursery rhyme
that haunts us when we sleep.
Born and raised in the New Orleans area, I live along Bayou Lacombe in southeast Louisiana. A graduate of LSU, I received my PhD in theoretical physics from Stony Brook University. I have lived and worked in New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and currently test rockets at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. Poetry credits include Big Muddy, Bindweed Magazine, Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, The Cape Rock, Confrontation, Crack the Spine, decomP, Edison Literary Review, El Portal, Euphony, Evening Street Review, Grey Sparrow, Medicine and Meaning, Neologism Poetry Journal, The Oxford American, Pembroke Magazine, Pennsylvania English, The Phoenix, Plainsongs, Quiddity, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, SLAB, Steam Ticket, Whimperbang, Wild Violet, the Love Notes anthology (Vagabondage Press), and Down to the Dark River: An Anthology of Contemporary Poems about the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press). Flash fiction credits include Infective Ink and Aspen Idea (2012 Aspen Writers’ Foundation/Esquire Short, Short Fiction Contest finalist).