Man on the Moon

 

The radio is tuned to some oldies station

when a siren begins to wail outside, spinning lights

around the walls like lazy butterflies on

the diminished gravity of the moon.

 

I was ten or twelve or maybe eight

when they put a man on the moon,

watching television in the living room

with my mom and dad, leaning up against

the coffee table or else sitting back

against the old blue sofa with ice cream stains,

believing back then that

all things were possible.

 

I used to pray, “Oh Lord, don’t let them drop that

bomb, don’t let them send me to fight, and

please make that little girl with the

ponytails and the braces mine.”

I can’t remember her name now --

she lived down the street--

and sitting next to my mother’s hospital bed

on the last night of her life,

I couldn’t remember what it was

I ever feared about the bomb.

 

“Galveston oh Galveston

I am so afraid of dying.”

 

I’ll never go home again,

I said. 

I’ll never wake up

in this world again, she thought.

But when it was over

I went home, like a character

in a sappy song that never used

to move me,

and I went to sleep

with the radio on

and the lights off,

waiting for my time to arrive.

---

Jose Padua’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bomb, Salon.com, Exquisite Corpse, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Unbearables, Crimes of the Beats, Up is Up, but So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, and many other journals and anthologies. He had read his work at the Lollapalooza Festival; CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, and the Public Theater in New York; the Black Cat Club and the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C.. After living in big cities for most of his life, he now finds himself living in Front Royal, Virginia.