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It’s been a rough week in my day job, with friends and colleagues literally in the crosshairs as bullets struck at least four buildings at the CDC. I remember my internship there decades ago, hiking past the Emory campus every day to walk the halls of what I saw as the public health mothership.

Perspective matters so much—how we see the world, what we believe. I could create a found poem from the lines that flooded social media—those locked down inside the CDC walls until evening, those at neighboring Emory who heard the shots, those halfway across the world waking to 100s of texts. Those like me, watching in horror, saddened for the loss of one of the officers who responded. Perspective crafts our narratives.

I often turn to words to process what I feel, but this week, words returned to me as physical constructs in the world: three poems I had cast into the sea that landed in the nets of publications.

Each one is about perspective, but one hits a little too close to home, the meaning I crafted years ago transformed by my current view of the world. Asking questions of the stars (Illumen, Summer 2025) is a cautionary tale for scientists probing the edges of what is known: “Astronomer, be wary. When you angle for the stars, what you catch may burn you.”

The other two poems feature scientists who fly (however doomed the flight): Icarus (Peer Review), from The Model 8 Polysomnograph, also in Illumen; and Winged Girl, from The March, in Star*Line, told from the perspective of a young mage-scientist who can see through the eyes of birds.

Asking questions of the stars will appear in The Women of Myth, my next chapbook forthcoming from Island of Wak-Wak.