Jesse Wolfe

Spacewalk

Let go at last  —
nothing in most directions except vast
black silence    No stars disturb the soothing view
of zero’s interiors    Behind me   a quarter-sphere of blue  —
memory-trace of earth  —  lingers
behind fingers of condensing
or dissolving clouds

I’ve hovered here before     I’ve wondered before
if I’d return          again                                                                                           

                                    Unlearn

          detach

from the mother-ship  —  I’m only held   only lashed
by a fluttering wire or two 

            from plunging into

                        a dry baptismal bath

never to be reborn   just joyfully released

into a terminal impersonal peace

Jesse Wolfe's poetry has appeared in publications including Tower Journal, Good Works Review, Mad Swirl, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. An English professor at California State University, Stanislaus, Wolfe previously served as Faculty Advisor to Penumbra, the campus's student-run literary and art journal. His scholarly work includes the monograph Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury: The Progress of Intimacy in History (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2023). His debut poetry collection, En Route, was published in 2020 by Cathexis Northwest Press.