Rose Stewart: I’ll Probably Never Meet the Moon
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
Alison Takes Us All to the Moon
No one’s ever passed the Bechdel test on the moon,
like, no one’s even passed the Bechdel test with the moon—
how embarrassing for us—how dare we call
the moon fickle for waxing and waning
and wandering through the constellations—she must be
so bored, watching from above, fingercombing the oceans
as they swell beneath her. I hope from up there
she knows, at least, how pretty girls are,
and she can see their smiles and their bellies
and the mangoes of their cheeks.
I am standing in my bedroom with a girl
I’m trying to impress, and she’s like, I love this book,
and she takes her finger down Fun Home’s spine,
and the flat of her hand has freckles on it,
and when the flat of her hand meets the flat of my hand
it’s warm, and she’s warm, and it will always be July.
In a perfect world, Alison Bechdel would pilot a
rocketship straight up to the moon, and the entire acronym
would be invited—a logistical catastrophe, I know—though,
I feel like some old couples with mortgages and babies
who’ve marched for mortgages, who’ve marched for babies,
who’ve marched for a front lawn to kiss in,
might decline the invitation, having traveled so far already.
Not to mention, all my exes would be there—still,
I would go, and that’s how much I love the moon:
enough to be the first to discover whether
or not one can blush in the cold of space. The ship
is named Artemis 18, which is so perfect it’s tacky,
and we pretend all to hate it to sound cynical and interesting
until we push past the stratosphere, and less matters,
and it’s it beautiful how we’ve made queering
a verb, how it means to make nebulous—no—
how it means to find the nebulas within. We
land. Alison gesticulates broadly, says, “This is who you’ve all
been writing your fucking poems about,”
and if I put my palms to the grey dirt, if I
put my knees to the grey dirt, would it
just be grey dirt, would the blood of my body
high tide heave? The first time a boy
touched me because I was a girl,
he was a man—he was my sixth-grade industrial tech teacher,
nothing personal—over the years, his rough hands
would pilot down one friend’s v-neck,
land in another’s pockets—we swapped stories to make
each other laugh until one day an eighth-grade boy overheard us
at lunch, and he joke explained itself and stopped being funny.
That day in particular, the class built rockets out of
paper towel tubes, and when mine didn’t fly as far
as everyone else’s, I didn’t want to ask why. I googled
his name once: they threw a banquet when he retired.
So I’ll probably never meet the moon,
but if I got the chance, I’d have so much to say.
I bet she, like, doesn’t even like science that much—
or telescopes—or industrial tech—or maybe even poems—
or any of the other ways that dead men
have tried to understand her from far away
in hopes of making her theirs alone.
Rose Stewart is a Southern writer.
