Somewhere, a girl googles dark matter
and Katy Perry launches her into unimaginable
tax brackets, sells her a vinyl
of “Teenage Dream” and a guitar to learn string theory.
The world, she says, is so mother, after releasing
tons of ozone-depleting greenhouse gas emissions and songs
off her Lifetimes setlist, while NASA strips its website
of the Artemis program, all mentions of women, indigenous
people and environmental justice, all the math about what it took
to accomplish this type of thing. It’s not about her,
she says, then she says it again, grounded and honored by this
62-Denvers-high Uber ride, finding love in the Cosmos for exactly a quarter
of its air time and a few million past its budget, our cute moon
sponsored by Amazon while the rainforest burns.
Stars, they’re just like us. Not
from a whole ‘nother world, not a waste of space
just another California Gurl streaming live into a vacuum:
“What a wonderful world.”
–
Riley O’Connell has been published in Plainsongs, La Piccioletta Barca, Not Very Quiet, Making Waves: A West Michigan Review, Pink Panther Magazine, Evocations Review, The Passionfruit Review, Colossus: Body, and The Santa Clara Review, the last of which she later served as Editor in Chief. A native of Littleton, Colorado, now living in San Francisco with her partner, she holds a BA in English from Santa Clara University, with minors in Communications and (nearly) Italian.
