from the ether
NASA/Firefly Aerospace © March 2, 2025
on . . .the Moon!
Yes. It’s true. I’m now officially, though not bodily, part of the lunar landscape. Through the Lunar Codex, my poem “4.6 Billion Years,” etched in nickel plated NanoFiche, became part of a time capsule that includes the work of artists, musicians, and writers from all around the globe, a cultural project including well over 300,000 contributors! The Serenity time capsule blasted off as part of the private LifeShip payload onboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander to the Moon. The craft achieved a perfect landing in Mare Crisium on March 2, 2025, its shadow reflected on the lunar surface, Earth in the distance, at left.
One poem among so much art can sound pretty insignificant, but it has just gone where most poems to date have never gone before. It’s pretty heady and very surreal and sounds a bit like a familiar television show now in endless reruns...
What’s that got to do with the Spring Issue of DMQ Review? Well for one thing, as someone involved for over 20 years with the curation of poetry and art, I now have a larger appreciation of the work we do together here at the journal. I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but together the editors and various contributors are creating another type of time capsule, one alive in the ether so to speak, another place poems had “never gone before” until the advent of the internet.
And the experience has certainly broadened my understanding of poetry’s potential reach, not only in the lives of the poets and artists whose work we curate, but for the readers here on planet Earth as well. In essence, we too present a small record of creative expressions, a sampling of contemporary prose poems that reflect our life and time, Spring 2025. Here we offer a microcosm of English language poetry captured in spacetime. And, to drift further into celestial, even cosmic metaphor, we find these to be stellar poems indeed.
We hope you’ll enjoy the sublunary journey and, as you drift through these pages, we’re sure you’ll be starstruck by the unforgettable images of our featured artist, Suzanna Schlemm. Do check out more of her work at her website. We are grateful to her and appreciate the opportunity to bring these words and images together, a conversation we hope you’ll join.
And while I’m at it, it cannot go without saying that we appreciate You, our readers, to the Moon—and back! Thanks for reading with us.
from the Ether,
Sally Ashton
Editor-in-Chief