The Moon Smells Like Burnt Gunpowder
How did we smell it when our heads were screwed
into our helmets? Easy. We touched it
with gloved hands, walked the empty vistas
like shades of the Otherworld,
and the regolith held an electric charge,
stuck to everything: the crannies
of our suits, the Module’s disced feet –
a fine film of lunar soil
that filled the cabin with the smell
of bitter sulfur, Roman candles
aimed at a best friend’s ear.
Made you feel the red prickles of a kickbruise
welling on your shoulder, back when
the moon was a faraway dream.
But when we studied the molecules,
they were all wrong – not combustible at all.
Just glass. Motes formed
and scattered by meteorite impacts.
The moon smells like burnt gunpowder,
we said. We had to say something.
“The Moon Smells Like Burnt Gunpowder” originally appeared in EPOCH and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
Dana Koster was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a 2012 recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, PN Review, The Cincinnati Review and EPOCH, among others. She lives in California’s Central Valley with her husband and young son.
