By Jessica Cohn

SCENE. The dark side of the ocean. Horizon and heaven, in their usual

posi­tions. A rounded moon, strick­en white. Stars, like bright tacks.

The water, con­fess­ing over and over what changes, what doesn’t.

VOICEOVER. Plath likened the mind to light, called it cold and planetary.

And I’m faraway like that, strolling with ice cream, when a stranger in a hoodie

jumps up from the rock wall. Under street­light, his eye­glass­es flash, then

a gun barrel, because—America. It’s no toy. It’s a tele­scope, big as a cannon.

THE MAN says, Here. And ready or not, the man with the tele­scope is

talking to me. He sets a tripod, with a click. A young woman with bracelets

over wrist­bands steps over, asks for a look. He gives her space to see.

RANDOM GIRL (sound of shuf­fling) My God!

AND I believe her. People start to pace in con­cen­tric circles on the pebbled

side­walk, like seag­ulls around a taco wrapper, to see for them­selves how

looking down can be looking up, how an eye­piece can fill with bright

wilder­ness over broken ocean, and how you can lose your mind there,

in Tycho’s stare.

Man with the moon trains on the south­ern crater, and on my turn I see

ejecta rays, the black blood­shot glow of a shared eye. When Galileo first saw

the moon up close, he thought to measure changes in its shadows—to give us

a new uni­verse, Earth, no longer cen­tered. And on my turn, I can see how

a glimpse can change even decayed orbits of the mind. Man with the moon

yaks on about astron­o­my club, how they were out at the Pin­na­cles, sleeping

under warm stars they knew how to name. He made the scope himself—

and I cannot fathom that pre­ci­sion, not as he fixes on the white rings of Saturn,

looking like the disks tossed at pins at the board­walk. Not as I see—it’s so clear—

I have mis­tak­en planets for stars all my life. While Saturn, circled by our attention,

sud­den­ly glows brighter and we become celes­tial in kind:

the elderly woman with the hump,

the wide man with his beery breath,

the busser with the cough,

the long-married couple in their date-night clothes.

Jessica Cohn’s first poetry col­lec­tion, GRATITUDE DIARY (Main Street Rag), is set for pub­li­ca­tion in fall 2024. In addi­tion to poems, she’s written non­fic­tion books, fiction, news, fea­tures and more, mainly in the field of edu­ca­tion­al pub­lish­ing. A Michi­gan native, Cohn has made homes in Illi­nois, New York, and most recent­ly, Cal­i­for­nia, where she has devel­oped her poetry prac­tice with the support of the Santa Cruz com­mu­ni­ty of writers. For more, visit jessicacohn.net.

This poem orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 21. Support local book­sellers and inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers by order­ing a print copy of the mag­a­zine.

Photo by Jeremy Thomas