Princess
My great-grandmother was no Cherokee princess.
Apparently there were thousands of them anyway.
She was probably Cree, and only thirteen years old
when a man in his thirties took some interest
and adopted/bought/married her, whereupon she
commenced having children over the next fifteen
years, including my grandmother. While she was
without crown and position, I’m confident all that
entitles her to some level of royal acknowledgement.
She deserves a crown of fashioned flowers and feathers
at the head her gravestone, a feather for every child
that lived, a flower for every one that died early,
no halo of sorts, a simple headdress of celebration.
Man and Dog
A giant, square upper-bodied man, anchored
with a thin leash to the tiniest husky-like, what?
Some small breed of dog. A cute arm-full for me,
but only a hand-full for this man now tackling
his second heaping platter of chow, seconds
offered by his chattering buddies over brunch
at the VA café, an empty plate and bowl already
tossed to the side, the dog with its camouflage
service vest resting back on its haunches, eyeing
upward, intent at the man’s beard covered mouth,
his large jaw ratcheting mouthfuls of food as big
as the dog’s head one after the other, challenging
the animal’s training of patience and calm, tongue
lolling. The man speaks in grunts, thin-lipped
nods. A toddler skips by and his quickly down
trying to pet the dog, his mother apologizing
quickly, the man now beaming, eyes now alight,
his boom of a voice clear over the room’s crowd,
letting little Nellie know it’s OK to let them pet her,
and to the mother that she loves kids as his huge
fingertips gentle a tiny slice of bacon to the dog.
Mars Mission - Crew VIII. Humanities Personnel. 2031.
The scientists and engineers and physicians went out first,
all NASA-nauts, super-competitors, fame-bound from birth
probably, perfect health, perfect teeth and hair, pedigrees,
the 4.5 minute miler geniuses who could research, build,
problem solve and survive for what was left of their lives
on their new inhospitable home of the Mars World Project.
With enough of those sorts there, they were called a colony.
Rumor was one of the first of the scientific crew sent word
after her first year on planet:
>> There is no poetry here <<
Those who knew, knew better, of course. If there were
eyes and ears and lips and tongues, minds and fingers
there on the planet, beating hearts, poetry existed.
But who would create this strange new language?
There was a call for a one-way-trip historian, teacher,
song-writer, artist, novelist, and yes, even a red planet poet.
Critics were ruthless. A television show based how zero
gravity effected creativity and the mind, with dozens
of artists crammed into a satellite commune for a year,
with two voted off each week with the help of the audience,
only lasted a single season. It was a terrible plan.
The experts took over.
It morphed too bureaucratic, of course, with calls
for applications and corporatized mission statements:
Q: Why do you want to write poems on Mars?
A: Who could resist but to write poetry for Mars?
Crew VIII, specific to Humanities Personnel, was a response
to that strange one sentence cry for help. And that’s what
we knew it to be, we humanities experts, we “touchy-feely
thinkers” as we were known, the underfunded storytellers,
we cave painters, we stump-sitting philosophers soon to be
shot to the stars to ruminate on the what ifs of rocks and sand.
But more than anything to venture past the world of binary
0s and 1s, though all our umbilical lives were linked there,
to give the sociologists and anthropologists more than math
to wonder on, to offer posterity so much more than:
>> Sol 1: Sunrise: 7:37 – Unremarkable <<
Larry D. Thacker is a writer and artist from Tennessee. His poetry can be found in journals and magazines such as The Still Journal, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee, Mojave River Review, Broad River Review, Harpoon Review, Rappahannock Review, and Appalachian Heritage. He is the author of Mountain Mysteries: The Mystic Traditions of Appalachia, the poetry chapbooks, Voice Hunting and Memory Train and the forthcoming full collection Drifting in Awe. He is presently taking his MFA in poetry and fiction at West Virginia Wesleyan College.