Over the Moon by Marie Vibbert

February 2021 | Utopia Science Fiction Magazine

You will go to the moon.
You will pack too much and not the right things but
This won’t change his smile when you meet him, or
Your chemistry job — there will be brilliant days and dull and
You will despair of finding a useful mineral in regolith
So much silica, so much dust.
You will meet him when you both board the train,
And you won’t speak to him the first few times, though you notice his beauty.
You will talk about rain on the day the pipes burst.
The day after the iron compound worked out,
The day before you will bind your new compound.
You will long for the healthy soakings of summer,
You will remember it better than it was,
And you will make him regret never having danced his new-paved street in a nightgown,
That Bacchanal thirteenth summer.
He will imagine it more magical than your distorted memory.
He won’t be able to talk to you for days because of the pedestal he put under you.
You will bound lightly into a weightless lonely weekend and
Your new compound will taste like sweet paprika
You will stand a little straighter, a little quieter, when you see
Luna Pepper, the hand-lettered label on the canister in the café.
The commute is regular and every day you are in the same car as him, because you enter
at a certain trajectory and the trains stop just so and you
Will talk of lesser things and
You will see him tuck a shaker into a pocket.
You will be over the moon.

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END

Originally published in the February 2021 issue of Utopia Science Fiction Magazine.

Marie Vibbert’s poems have appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and also in tiny esoteric corners of the poetry verse. By day she is a computer programmer in Cleveland, Ohio. Her debut novel comes out this March. It’s called Galactic Hellcats and is about a female biker gang in outer space rescuing a gay prince.