Moon Landing Day

Tides move back and forth 

seven miles above the Mariana Trench

where fish with luminescent spines

and giant red worms sip sulfur through volcanic vents.

The moon, gray and white,

circles like a ball on a string.

Man cannot breathe in space,

nor under a thousand tons of water.

And on that day when man stood on the moon,

breathing in weightless vanity,

all of air and water and weird creatures 

rose to the surface and exploded.

This poem is from the chapbook Moon Landing Day. Available now at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/moon-landing-day-by-alissa-sammarco/

Alissa Sammarco uses cinematic imagery to freeze those moments in time and evoke the feeling of revisiting them.  She examines the common in life and relationships to find the extraordinary. Her work has appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig, Black Moon Magazine, Change Seven, Quiet Diamonds, The Main Street Rag, Stone Canoe, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, Rat’s Ass Review, the 2021 and 2022 Lexington Poetry Month Anthologies, and elsewhere. She is the author of two chapbooks, Beyond the Dawn and I See Them Now (Turning Point).  Alissa lives and practices law in Cincinnati, Ohio.www.AlissaSammarco.com.