Poetry: Chloe Martinez

APOLLO

Reprinted by permission of The Normal School, Copyright 2010 by Chloe Martinez.
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Their voices come back to us thin with static:
describing a pockmarked dustscape, they sound

almost disappointed, until they turn and see—
blue-marbled, strange, familiar—earth

rising over that dry horizon, the continents
all in their right places, clouds

over the Canaries, clear sky over Mexico,
the sea around the land around the sea.

It’s Christmas. The astronauts read Genesis
over the airwaves to the listening world,

And in the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth, tenderly, with a Texan twang,

as travelers, having crossed oceans, stand on a cliff
squinting into the distance, trying to see home.

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CHLOE MARTINEZ’s poetry has appeared in The Cortland Review, The Normal School, and The Collagist, and is forthcoming in Another and Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series (Bull City Press, 2012). She lives in Haverford, PA with her husband and daughter.