A.J. Huffman- Two Poems

Swimming Saturn’s Rings

She slips her skin, splashes through the atmosphere.

What’s left of her body dissolves into glistening matter,

dissipates, becoming part of the surrounding circumference.

Internal organs pulse like stars in formation yet to be named.

Light years away from where she began, she surfaces,

stares at surrounding curtain of blackened sky.  She wonders

what the light of celestial bodies feels like from a distance,

mourns those confined by gravitational pull.  They will

never know continuity in its purest form.

Red Sand Beach

I pretend I can breathe,

extract myself from protective coverings

necessary for travel.  33.9 million miles from home,

the distance to this temperate paradise where

I am immediately lighter,

require no anchor.  I lie

back, sink into the embrace

of blood-tinged dust, disappear into my own

imagination, my dream of diving

into waves that will never rise

on this deserted planet,

unless human hands interject, introduce

disastrous global warming effects on glacial caps. 

I shudder at the thought, or possibly the fading

daylight hours.  I rise to a distorted reality,

a clear image of earth moving to take a place

in the sky that used to belong to the moon.

A.J. Huffman has published six solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses.  Her seventh solo chapbook will be published in October by Writing Knights Press.  She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the winner of the 2012 Promise of Light Haiku Contest.  Her poetry, fiction, and haiku have appeared in hundreds of national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, Kritya, and Offerta Speciale, in which her work appeared in both English and Italian translation.  She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press.  www.kindofahurricanepress.com