‘Space Struck’ by Paige Lewis

He says, How deep, like he’s reaching into a galaxy.
He says, How full, and looks up to see if I wince.

At the crossroads of fact, fiction, and things unexpected, we have this wonderful poem by Paige Lewis. Inspired by the only known victim of being struck (indirectly) by a meteorite, Ann Hodges, this poem takes root in a single moment in time and expands. The thing about good poetry is that it takes you to unexpected places. No, this is not about the meteorite fragment’s journey, the events before and after dictated like a series of events in a newspaper article; these are fragments that build up to a whole of a person.

He seemed

disappointed, A thinner woman would’ve died. I was
small when I was young. Didn’t take up much space.

It was the unexpected intimacy of knowing a person, the lamentation of things past, the peek into a relationship almost as eavesdropped conversation. The poem treads the fine line between presumption and honesty, reality and the unknown, but finds even keel in the brief and vivid spark of humanity that illuminates much of the latter half of the poem.

Sugar House Review