A new poem of mine Little Lost Cosmonaut – combining science fiction with a ghost story, what's not to like there! – has just been published on the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Eye to the Telescope zine (see link).

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Little Lost Cosmonaut*
by Charles Christian


Poor little Valentinka
Lovely little Valentinka
Floating in her tin-can
Heaven above, the Earth below
Both unattainable now

A jammed valve 50 years before
Hypoxia then asphyxia
oxygen starvation and death
The ghost of Valentinka stares down
at her own desiccated body

Celebrated and beautiful in life
she could have been a red star
in the Soviet firmament
with her own black ZiL limousine
and a dacha in the country

Valentinka’s ghost still recalls
the taste of vodka, the smell of borscht
the sound of the balalaika
And walking hand-in-hand in Gorky Park
then kissing by the banks of the Moskva

But hers was a secret mission
and Mother Russia buries her mistakes
Everyone she ever loved or trusted
is now dead and gone or else chose
to forget the girl they once knew

Standing by her capsule’s window
from time to time she sees the flares
of rocket-ships soaring up from Earth
Maybe tomorrow rescue will come?
But no one sees or hears her signals

Like a matryoshka nest of dolls:
lift the hatch, open the Vostok
see the shrivelled corpse, free the ghost
Poor little Valentinka
Lonely little Valentinka


* There is a long-running conspiracy theory that, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, as many as 18 Soviet cosmonauts (including two women) were lost in space on never-publicly disclosed flights. The majority are still out there.