Artemis
Brittney Corrigan
We can build a ladder to anything.
Sing, goddess, of how our rungs
tongue at the edge of Earth’s night.
Bright sphere we worship and leash,
greasing our rockets for the trip.
We slip into lunar suits, stare, knock
airlocks open into the cratered dust.
Crust of oxygen, silicon, magnesium.
Calcium, iron, aluminum. Minerals
feral on the far side, in the starry dark.
Mark this hunt with a footprint, a flag.
Drag the skin of the surface back:
rack of antlers for our home planet’s
mantel. Satellite skull of the Moon,
strewn with debris we left behind,
we find you wild-less, un-animaled.
Called by tidal force, the first woman—
human heart slowed in outer space—
places her foot on volcanic ground.
No sound, like a deer in the wood.
Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections *Daughters*, *Breaking*, *Navigation*, and *40 Weeks*. *Solastalgia*, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2022. Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. She is currently at work on her first short story collection. For more information, visit http://brittneycorrigan.com/.