Benjamin Dodds
Benjamin Dodds is the author of Regulator (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014). His work appears in The Best Australian Poems 2014 and was recently performed on Radio National’s Poetica program.
Space Age
My mother’s breasts were astronauts
drawn up close and high
in a latex matrix of Playtex warp and weft.
They manufactured the moon suits
(Playtex, not my mother’s breasts)
to swaddle men against silent death.
Twenty-one layers of failsafe stitching—
cascading redundancy
made vacuum-tight by hand
under the brief
that space is equilibrium.
No blood or breath
or saliva out there;
given the chance
the void takes its share.
I’m told I screamed each time
like depressurisation
at their smothering press
and just like those gods of Apollo
had to be fed powdered milk.