Lisa Ampleman
​

Self-Portrait as Laser Inferometer Space Antenna (LISA)
​
                          with language from lisa.nasa.gov

In space, LISA can avoid the noise of Earth
and access distant regions of the spectrum,
listening for gravitational waves with every

instrument in her three-bodied self.
She tends to remember the nitty-gritty
details of each of those bodies—from

which bread they like best to the last location
of the most beloved lovey. She’ll marshal
the three spacecraft separated by millions

of miles, which fly in the Earth’s wake
as it orbits the Sun. They’ll all get
to the right place at the right time,

as long as she provides the right mix of fuel
(fruit snacks, apples, light beer, salsa)
and rest. She can conjure up waffles

when the bread’s gone moldy.
This equilateral triangle of spacecraft
has three “arms” that extend to detect

ripples of violence from eons ago.
With her extremely long arms, LISA
can hold herself still. The digital thread

connecting them pulses with data,
coding a family out of three integers.
She requires the precision of picometers,

can note a shift in space-time less than
the diameter of a helium nucleus
over a million miles away. Just ask her

what that muscle twitch in the starboard
face of one spacecraft means. She’s got
an ear adapted to hear the roar from

two stars merging as they pass too close
to a black hole, maybe even the whisper of
quantum fluctuations in the early universe.

LISA’s in a customized package
optimized for spaceflight. Her lasers
must operate for generations

in the harsh environment of space,
the acidic dark of near-vacuum.
She’ll push past the stiffness in her joints,

chilled in the disinterested deep-freeze.
She will ride the gravitational waves,
measure the level of imperfection

as the delicate gold instruments
in the safe cavity of her interior
free-fall. With her help, we’ll
​
be able to detect ancient distortions
in the stretchy fabric of space-time
from disasters we won’t ever witness.
Space Pastoral
​

             This is Friendship Seven. I’ll try to describe what I’m in here.
             I am in a big mass of some very small particles, that are brilliantly
             lit up like they’re luminescent. I never saw anything like it.
                                                                         —John Glenn
​
If the prairie is thermosphere, fireflies
are frost sloughing off a metal capsule
that streaked from Florida into orbit,
heated then chilled then heated in sunrise
and -set sped up. The snowflakes luminesce.
They star-shower. They fail to seek a mate,
bound to the speed of falling, orbital
mechanics. In another life I hiked
through them in dusk, beetles tessellating
the fields, extinct stars brighter in the lack
of atmosphere. I mooned over a flirt
light years away. Ugh, I carried a torch,
for god’s sake. I longed for something
simpler, the plasma fireball, re-entry.
--
Lisa Ampleman is the author of a chapbook and three full-length books of poetry, including Mom in Space (forthcoming 2024) and Romances (2020), both with LSU Press. Her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in journals such as 32 Poems, Colorado Review, Ecotone, Image, and Southern Review. She is the managing editor of The Cincinnati Review and poetry series editor at Acre Books.