Another dermatologist, his voice a baritone of confidence, a foghorn, a steady hand, said, “We will be sure to treat this very aggressively. Because it’s the worst thing that can happen to a pretty young woman, her hair falling out.”

I stared at him for a beat too long, my thin brown hair knotting like brows.

“Well, you know,” he grinned and a hand fluttered in front of his face, a butterfly of bashfulness. “One of the worst things.”

Of all of us, she was the most tied to the telescope. It had been her idea. All these men and their obsession with disk size. A thirty foot disk, a sixty foot disk, a hundred foot disk. Part of her genius was to imagine a different shape: the wide fragile net.

Where a tank farm once pressed its fuel ask: what do we hold to the ground and how do we take it back.

Since I do not have enough [but] briefly I’ll summarize beginning [ ]
spinning on a tilt [ ] below Earth’s rotational axis [ ] in search of water ice [ ] on the dual moons of Mars [ ] Phobos & Deimos.

"Was this your plan all along?” Toby asked one night, his chin on my chest. He still smelled faintly of fish, which was how we all smelled these days. “Stealing the dolphin to get Sophia in?”

the return migration of her voice / performing a ritual of grooming / upon a shrine to polythene kudzu