Julia Anna Morrison

ASTRONAUT

When I wrote, the alphabet, like Earth, got smaller
as I got farther away

Words were spirals, figures. They became numerical.

My father, a physicist, said math was a language

The homework asked me to consider a girl on a sled
at a certain speed on an incline of x degrees

I could only see the red of the girl’s cheeks, the terrible horizon,
the guilt of the snow—

My father did my homework, calculating her arrival time
at the base of the glacial mountain

After, he drove me to ballet where he waited
across the street for an hour while I taught myself
to rotate my body in midair

He was careful to drive the long way back home
so we didn’t pass the glimmering hotel
where the accident occurred

There is an equation where we could have been saved
My father knows that math keeps us from floating away

He knew by then that I was too old to start ballet,
but he waited, believing less in variables and more
in how cold the car was getting,

only my turning silhouette visible
from where he idled in the empty parking lot
while the snow began to accumulate

JULIA ANNA MORRISON is a poet and filmmaker living in Iowa City. A Yaddo and MacDowell fellow, she has work in Brink, The Georgia Review, and Notre Dame Review .Her first book of poems is Long Exposure (Moon City, 2023).  She teaches at the University of Iowa.