Cripping Outer Space
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
I’m never leaving this planet alive
to travel across the starry firmament,
never to swim the seas of Europa,
blowing icy bubbles skyward.
I’d shed this skin for a spacesuit,
trade my limbs for an exoskeleton
to run freely across Martian soil,
forever untethered from Earth’s gravity.
I want to crip outer space,
send up fellow travelers
trained with breathing apparatuses,
armed with knowledge of machinery.
Send out a flotilla of accessible spacecraft
inhabited by multispecies coalitions
and jungles of biodiversity,
or at least let me pass the flight test.
May we one day leave gravity behind,
may we imagine queer and crip futures on this Earth,
may our fellow travelers take these futures to the stars,
may these words portend a beautiful, frightful future.
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About the Author
Angela Acosta is a bilingual Latina poet and Ph.D. Candidate in Iberian Studies at The Ohio State University. She won the 2015 Rhina P. Espaillat Award from West Chester University for her Spanish poem “El espejo” and her work has appeared or will appear in The Blue Moth, Pluma, MacroMicroCosm, and mOthertongue.