I once took a creative writing class from a short story writer of the bizarre, Adam Johnson (Parasites Like Us, Emporium). One of our prompts was to find a tabloid heading for a title; the inspiration was Robert Olen Butler's "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot." It was fantastic; I still remember writing "Aging Burglar Robs Own House." When I came across this news title, I couldn't help but scribble the phrase down, and flying to Seattle for an interview today, I got a moment to make it a poem.
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Astronaut Love Triangle
You can't say I didn't warn you.
My FAQ had this situation:
"What to do with an astronaut love triangle"
right below "When robots take over."
Somewhere between Earth and stars
hovers that maiden of fantasy.
You send men out there to harvest moon rocks,
build satellites or talk to Martians
and soon they'll realize the only pull
in space comes from themselves.
A year and they come to know the shuttle hull
pretty well, the air lock between now and after.
Astronaut love triangle:
it doesn't follow any of the laws of our world,
doesn't obey our sublunary flails in fetters and ideals. No--
up here, strip men of jobs, clothes, families, pets,
first loves, last loves, nationalities, alcohol,
and what could be purer? Here,
in the absence of money and guns
and locations more romantic than the infirmary,
here in the absence of poetry, the undiluted
emotions perspire. Envy, obsession, infatuation, hatred--
what else could there be
in a world with only Saturn's iridescent
rings, Jupiter's hot spot, all the stars you can imagine.
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