Spinning to Mars by Meg Pokrass

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spinning to Mars by Meg Pokrass Lisa Slage Robinson (bio) spinning to mars Meg Pokrass Blue Light Press http://megpokrass.com/spinning-to-mars/#:~:text=A%20collection%20of%2070%20linked 78 pages; Print, $15.95 See the red planet in my eyes, Kitten? Dad said, teeth stacked up like snow cones. "Only vertical trip worth taking." Sometimes it feels as if he's still sitting around, waiting for the milky world to line up and trust him. People will fall for anything. Some dangle the promise of a ride to Mars. Others dangle the promise of home. —"Ride to Mars," from Spinning to Mars Where does a man go when he leaves? Whether a father, a husband, a lover. Does he die or disappear into the night, an evanescent spirit spinning vertically [End Page 64] to Mars? What of the women, the wives and daughters left behind? Do they perform their own vanishing acts physically, emotionally, metaphysically? How do they cope? Where do they find solace? How do they replace the missing man-shaped hole in their universe? Abandonment looms large in Meg Pokrass's Spinning to Mars, sixty-seven micro-bursts of story, each no longer than a paragraph or two, that as a collective, flicker like old-timey home movies, at once distant and yet oddly intimate and voyeuristic, whispering memories of an entire life. A father confesses his intent to depart, a mother sits on a toilet bemoaning the lack of love in her life, a daughter hooks up with a boy behind the cafeteria. There's a move cross-country to California, illnesses and death, infidelity, failed marriages and new lovers, new continents, the rediscovery of snow and cold smoky breath. And ultimately a father-daughter reunion, a truce rather than a reconciliation. Pokrass has a knack for crafting compressed stories with just a handful of sentences, creating tiny planets, self-contained vessels of meaning, reminding me of the orb attached to the cat's collar in the movie Men in Black, an entire galaxy housed in a bauble. Sometimes the sentences stack up like mismatched socks, juxtaposed to seemingly disparate subjects and time frames, leaving the reader to supply the missing connective tissue. Sometimes the prose tiptoes along in a modest, informative sort of way and then a brilliant, gorgeous image blooms, such as this one from "Dry Skin" where a teenager reacts to her father's infidelity by developing her own precocious sexuality: Soon, she would be meeting a boy, not her boyfriend, by the creek at midnight. The honeysuckle flowers would have already bloomed, and she would teach the new boy to suck out drops of honey from the stems on the lawn. She would show him how to be that gentle—to get the drop to come out just right. Or an exquisite observation cuts to the core, as in: "She was splendid back then, her heart soft as a persimmon" (from "Night Heron"). Or illuminates the longing for a partner's passion that has long been extinguished: "She imagined climbing the Everest of his body, perching on the top of his belly like a sexy squid, dangling her breasts like fishing lines" (from "Between Animals"). Or sometimes, the sentences wink with poignant truisms. Sex is [End Page 65] like a donut. A dad's true nature can be divined from the antique marbles he left behind. A mother's presence can be felt in the shared affliction of a hammertoe. While the individual flashes can stand alone, requiring no further explanation, their arrangement in Spinning to Mars creates an extended narrative with one unifying voice directing the whole. A girl, then teenager, then young woman, then mature woman cycling through the decades searching for connection, looking for an unreliable man, a "man with a dog and a walk-in closet." The overall tone is melancholy. A lifetime of trying to repair the psychic damage that a father has inflicted as she confesses that she wants to "live on Love Street. To steal paperbacks about salvation sex, and hide them under her bed." She admits she would "dance with a man naked if he would take [her] inside his house...