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Hungover, I taught literature
in lunar tundra, wearing moon boots.
I moved sluggish as an astronaut,
addressed the nosecone-white dry erase board
as if encumbered by a spacesuit,
as if alone on the surface of the moon.
Clutched in swollen hands, my instrument poised,
I scrawled alien words like “verisimilitude",
I encircled codenames: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville
in bubbles, connected them with air hoses
in desperate bids to rewire the ignition
system and get my lecture back into orbit.
But sometimes in the midst of class I simply
shut my eyes and the world fell away. Hovered
before the students, free of language and gravity
for long, vacuous moments as my brain
gasped inside its throbbing socket and black holes
gaped and roared and sucked at the backs of my little capsule eyes.
Air searing bright around me, I would reenter
the classroom’s atmosphere, find myself bobbing
in a calm sea of bemused and concerned faces,
my SOS signal bleeping quietly its lonely message.
The 2002/2004 Whitney Latham Lechich Poet-in-Residence, Ryan Masters’ poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Iowa Review, California Quarterly, The Absinthe Literary Review, Poetry Motel, The Tule Review, Porter Gulch Review, Wilmington Blues, and So Luminous The Wildflowers: An Anthology of California Poets (Tebot Bach). A chapbook, below the low-water mark, is available from Pudding House (2003). He is the editor of The Bathyspheric Review.
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