sandbox
Sarosh Nandwani

the most beautiful thing about space is my hair
floats like a halo around me, the spacecraft smells
like burnt toast; suddenly the ceiling is also storage
space, all our clothes tucked into miraculous places –

we kick off the walls and do somersaults while hurtling
through the open hatches, there is no ceiling, everyone
is an inch or two taller but it doesn’t matter because
you can’t see height differences when everyone is floating;

bubbles of water surround me and I scoop them into
my mouth – it is a rainfall snapshot and everything is
glittering, my feet are soft, calluses from walking gone,
I can leave things floating and come back to them.

my legs never fall asleep, and I am tangled up in my
lover everywhere, everything is floating, there are hand
holds all along the walls, as if the spacecraft just wants
to be touched, and held, and sometimes we go to the room

with all the windows and watch the earth and moon
pass by, and the moon, oh, the moon, each pockmarked
crater a hint and treasure of what used to be, a maddening
curiosity, we leave our things there, we are slowly

borrowing space, this beautiful white expanse, there
is no GPS here, so we grab our maps and analog switches,
don our life-giving suits and dig like children in a sandbox,
maybe there is something here, maybe we will understand.