Neil Armstrong

So, Neil Armstrong lands in your pool. He claims
your newly stained deck in the name of all humanity.
He claims your six-pack of German microbrew.
He demands snacks. Tang if you’ve got it, space
food sticks. Neil Armstrong strips off his flight suit,
asks to borrow a towel. Oddly, he doesn’t seem to think
of your linens as his own. He wears Marvin
the Martian boxers. His skin is as pale as the man
in the moon. You offer him tanning cream. Neil
Armstrong steals your sunglasses, your favorite
lounger, makes you rub him down. He calls you his
pool boy, tells you if you do a good job he will teach
you more about Neil. He will name a mountain
range after you. When you explain Suburbia is flat,
he gawks at you like some unidentified object.
His jaw tightens, his brow knits, and he looks—
as if for the first time—around at your deck,
your trampoline, your wheat-fed neighbors still
staring over the privacy fence. He shrugs.
“This will do,” says Neil Armstrong,
“this sea of some tranquility.”









Bryan D. Dietrich is the author of six books of poems, Krypton Nights, Universal Monsters, Love Craft, The Assumption, Prime Directive, and The Monstrance. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Yale Review, Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and many other journals. He won The Paris Review Poetry Prize, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and the Asimov's Readers' Choice Award. Currently, he is a Professor of English at Newman University.