Richard J O’Brien was born in New Jersey and currently lives in Pennsylvania. He recently completed his MFA in creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Richard served in the army before the Berlin Wall came down and later went to Rutgers University, earning a BA in English. Earlier this year he participated in the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming at Falling Star Magazine, Loch Raven Review, The Houston Literary Review, New Plains Review, Citron Review, Stray Branch Literary Magazine, The Inflectionist Review, Petrichor Review, The Penwood Review, and O-Dark-Thirty, The Literary Journal of The Veterans Writing Project.  

Child Astronaut
By Richard J O’Brien

Broken bottle glass sings the memory electric
tonight in the old schoolyard.

Caged windows reflect
the moon’s forsaken face.

Static voices
tell of dreams in which space-faring
children live as adults on a planet
far from our own.

Once, in this same schoolyard,
my third grade teacher
charged me with leading an expedition to Mars.

Our cardboard box helmets
were not conducive to the red planet’s heat.

The mission ended ten minutes
before the class bell rang.

We came back to Earth empty-handed.

There were no Martians there.