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Houston, We Have a Popstar

This poem was originally published in 2025 in Poets Reading the News.

Somewhere, a girl googles dark matter

and Katy Perry launches her into unimaginable

tax brackets, sells her a vinyl

of “Teenage Dream” and a guitar to learn string theory.

The world, she says, is so mother, after releasing

tons of ozone-depleting greenhouse gas emissions and songs

off her Lifetimes setlist, while NASA strips its website

of the Artemis program, all mentions of women, indigenous

people and environmental justice, all the math about what it took

to accomplish this type of thing. It’s not about her,

she says, then she says it again, grounded and honored by this

62-Denvers-high Uber ride, finding love in the Cosmos for exactly a quarter

of its air time and a few million past its budget, our cute moon

sponsored by Amazon while the rainforest burns.

​

Stars, they’re just like us. Not

from a whole ‘nother world, not a waste of space

just another California Gurl streaming live into a vacuum:

​

“What a wonderful world.”

© Riley O'Connell 2025

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