Chris Stubenrauch




1.       They gave me the launch sequence, fed it to me in both of my ears, a number a day. It all seemed tedious and complicated, whether the whole thing was even going to work at all, so I scoured the freelancer sites for hours, didn’t make a dime. Too much of anything can ruin a man. I was expected to have trust, but it was about time to settle down, and far away. I dreamt of buying land on the open prairie and building a home. A dirt diamond into the side of the butte so the kids could play. A place to see the stars. There used to be dreams, they were built into the picture.

2.        The astronaut is stuffed into a box, walks on the moon, comes home, and then doesn’t know what to do. 

3.        Is the world a cold place? Depends on who you ask. Is the world a cold place? Well, was it of your own ambition that you found it cold? Is the world a cold place? Yes, reasonably so. The world is cold and the scanty light from all of the distant stars are somewhere already extinguished.

4.        Every movie I’ve ever seen starts the same: a pair of kids donning sheepskin hats riding in the back of a pickup with a wooden bat. The idea is to wait until the mail is delivered, the red flag is up, the papers secured, the folks away–and then it’s one good swing to bash in the box from there. 

5.       Traffic cones where they’re not supposed to be, let’s say, hanging off the vertex of a stop sign or equally replacing candles one for one on a vanilla birthday cake. We clap whenever we see them out of place, the escapees. We clap for whoever had the nerve to put them there. We scream of momentous, insurmountable joy.





Chris Stubenrauch is a space cowboy and sometimes-poet from near Baltimore, Maryland. His most recent release, Headwinds, was published in November 2023 and his work has previously appeared in High Plains Register and Bullshit Lit. His favorite poet is the late Charles Simic.