Bridget Kriner

Bridget Kriner (she/her) is a poet and community college professor in Cleveland, Ohio. She has a BA and MA in English from Cleveland State University. Her work has appeared in Whiskey Island, Split this Rock and Common Threads. Guide to Kulchur-Green Panda Press, a local Cleveland press, published her chapbook, Autoethnography in 2014. She won First Place in the Abortion Rights Poetry Contest in 2012. She lives with her partner and two children, along with their dog and cats.

Shatner & Hadfield on the Motherhood

It was like I went to space inside a little spacesuit with noise, fire & fury, holding for dear life.
The disappearing Earth took up my whole mind. They say, don’t worry about anything, but it’s

as if I just stepped off a cliff. Everything’s going to be fine, they say, while the walls
in the nursery were coated in vantablack & I just couldn’t get the Hindenburg out of my head.

Inexplicably between fragility & vicious coldness, my face melting, sinuses not draining
& only one of my eyes working. Crying only works on Earth–tears don’t fall in space.

I look down & there’s blue, a pouring glory in her soft eyes, a kaleidoscope roaring
by silently. Standing on 250 miles of emptiness, everything I had thought was wrong,

so I let my eyes adjust to the darkness. I saw the hole in our spaceship punched through the blue-
tinged layer & there was light under my feet in ribbons & curtains – a fantastic laser light

show for miles, death & beauty settling into iridescence, time dilating. She is silently answering
the mystery of the universe, its yawning endlessness & questions of exploration, hypotheses

of stars exploding, their light traveling to us years later. It took two times around the beige
desert, white clouds & blue sky & I turned back toward the light of her. It was life, tethering

me glowing with the light of another dawn.