Katie Naughton: Two Spacewalks

spacewalk: the great American moon summer

    listening to Eno’s Apollo
    on the hottest run of days
    in the history of records
    you’re aching and closed off
    in another room so I won’t
    breathe your air a chrome
    siren another and it’s getting
    dark we stood in the vibrating summer
    lot each alone in breath
    and fluid to be tested
    we stood together in the street
    to count our breath together
    some people came home
    some others in the cold of space
    while they became moonscape
    silent and mechanical science
    of technology and life
    hybrid motion and ultimate nomination
    call you to be so named
    by the body of humanity
    I mean what we call body is
    operative and tells death
    America who to come for
    that the drawings my grandmother
    pulls from the attic 1969’s idea
    it read of American heroics
    battles aeronautics landscape itself
    not neutral the white space
    of American space
    who will call the color
    call it deep blue day
    the cold of lake water
    the red of blood or berries
    the white hot flash of sun
    the thick dark warmth
    of forest and night
    and motion fast and small under
    all that sky astonishing
    of every growing thing
    around whom that wraps
    tropic whose beauty
    whose death called
    whose beginning
    we have to make it
    everyone’s moon
    start calling space
    black and possible

spacewalk: moon summer

    
    what enigma of nostalgia
    I mean blue morning
    releasing the wood smell
    from the floorboards
    one could almost be born
    with America on the moon
    born having a new tearing
    feeling to it in anticipation
    I mean the air is more
    than anyone can ask for
    staying home outside
    I keep moving in the panic
    of others a regular feeling
    intensified like there’s another
    depth I hadn’t even known
    before and some calm in having
    placed it and also a dark
    spreading liquid stain
    calling that night
    in America

    *

    it’s the moon summer
    honestly it always is
    the extravagance of heat
    the village feeling
    of who is home
    in the afternoon
    (it’s everyone)
    the world ends and
    we sit on the stores
    the myth is superceded
    by what always was
    we were bodies in space
    we were being born
    we were alone in hot
    fragrant rooms
    we were what was taking
    what was taken-from

Katie Naughton is the author of the poetry collection The Real Ethereal (Delete Press 2024), and the chapbooks Study (Above/Ground Press, 2021), A Second Singing (Dancing Girl Press, 2023), and Debt Ritual (forthcoming from Fonograf Editions/Bunny, 2025). Her poetry has been published in Fence, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. She is an editor at Essay Press, the HOW(ever) and How2 Digital Archive Project, and Etcetera, a web journal of poetry and poetics (www.etceterapoetry.com). She lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY Buffalo.