Poems by Caroline Hockenbury
By Caroline Hockenbury
For Albert II (June 14, 1949)
I would ask you how it felt
to be the first—to burst
open the membrane
between sky and space
—but they sedated you.
Brandished your heartbeat
on their dashboard. Your body
locked into a crude suit;
your breast pasted over
with sensors so they could watch
electric impulses blast off
inside you. You reached
62 miles and then some,
vital signs still aflicker
like stars fighting darkness.
From where you sat, screwed
into that metal apparatus,
could you sense the shift
in gravity somewhere
deep and primal
inside you? Somehow
it made sense to them
to send three rhesuses
and a crab-eating macaque
into the black,
to not even bother
changing their names
across missions. Albert
II, it was you
who reframed the game
grown men have played
for decades. Your tiny fingertips
grazed the cosmos way back when
soaring was still a myth.
You made yourself
a meteorite. In my mind,
I fall back to foolproof
the parachutes
they strapped you
and Albert IV into.
I tighten the valve
Albert’s oxygen oozed out of
and rewind
the 10.7 seconds it took
for a missile tail to shatter
Albert III completely.
Albert II, men have touched the moon,
and it’s all because of you
with your rigid brows
and small, stern face cocooned
by that weird silver mesh,
your flesh rising
to the beat of breath and blood
until the nose of your V2
spirals beyond the speed of sound
and buries itself into the ground,
under the earth’s skin, tunneling
toward a red-hot core that pulses
out the rhythm of history.
I can’t save you, but I will try
to tell them it was you
who zipped into a spacesuit,
widened your eyes into supergiants,
and won the long race.
“Scissors”
By Caroline
Hockenbury
You seem like someone who’d carry
a surgical pair in their tote, just in case
you came upon an injured pigeon
in the city. Calmly, you’d palm her.
Swaddle her in a cut-off sock.
Apply your training
and antiseptic spray. Slice away
twine cuffing her ankles
and hair gnarled between toes,
tearing toward bone. In my dreams,
you wear a volunteer tee
and scour the streets for signs
of stringfeet. All afternoon,
you scatter wheat seed
and unwhirl others’ apathy,
giving circulation back to birds,
giving birds back to blocks.
Still, some digits will purple
and curl, ultimately falling away.
But today, you are styptic powder,
keeping innocence from bleeding
out, here on sun-bruised cement.
“Tadpoles, 2003”
By Caroline
Hockenbury
That year, excavators and concrete trucks scarred our backyard
with tire marks. We take the basketball goal for granted now,
forgetting how mud clumps once reigned here. But remember
the ruts that summer rain slid into? Squatting, I studied tadpoles
in the standing pools, their slate black bodies all flutter and slime.
To my surprise, they’d made a home of this stinking muck! My parents’
addition had taken my favorite tree by then. Men sealed off doorways
with plastic sheets, and Mom let us eat Kid Cuisines one night
in the sad light of our dining room. I’d seen baby frogs before:
At the neighbors’ patio pond, I leaned over rocks, tossing fish food
like confetti. A waterfall mixed in the flecks. Dad scooped a dozen
squirming souls into some Tupperware I cradled in the car.
Water slapped the plastic walls; some sediment danced within,
but it was translucent and bright, unlike the sludge puddled
back home. Collin and I kept two tree frogs total: Cope’s gray
and full-grown. We peeled them off back windows then stole
away to the mudroom to inspect them, our stickiest pets. Crickets
flickered in blown-up bags on the counter. Tweezers dropped grubs,
struggling, into a terrarium stocked with twigs and moss. Whatever
happened to that reptile bath we bought? Freckles (then, later, Splat)
perched on the lip of it, organs pulsing in their bellies like big brass bands.
Life marches on as long as it can, even when locked in a box.
We had front-row seats to every hunt, whooping when muscly, pink
tongues seized a bug. But sticks and stones don’t make a biome.
Mom kept the show going for about a year each. Sometimes, I’d sneak
in alone just to hold one in my cupped hands—feel the percussive kiss
of his heartbeat on my fingertips before he inevitably slipped through
my grip, flipped onto the floor, and fled into dog-haired shadows.
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Caroline Hockenbury is a Pushcart-nominated poet and essayist based in
Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Attached to the Living World: A
New Ecopoetry Anthology, About Place Journal, The Dodge, and Tinderbox,
among other publications. Caroline holds an MFA from American University, where
she won the Myra Sklarew Award, and is an alumna of the University of
Virginia’s Area Program in Poetry Writing. If she’s not drafting copy or web
editing, she’s probably taking a picture of a toad in portrait mode to text to you.
Find her online at carolinehockenbury.com