Feminists On Mars

​by Caroline Miller

I want to start a feminist society on Mars
where every little girl has an astronaut Barbie Doll 
and names her Sally, after Sally Ride.

I want to come back down to Earth for class reunions and say 
I live on Mars now, and what are you going to do about it?

Where there’s almost no air, where it’s freezing,
where we are all shapeless and metallic in our spacesuits
and everything is solar-powered and we learn to love this 
barren dust that offers nothing, the way we have always loved

copper star clusters, this haze of luminous matter only imagined:
red planet, war planet, blood planet, we know what it means to live here.
                        
Here we do not start in a garden 
but grow it ourselves, slowly,
inch-by-inch inside terrariums 
the size of football stadiums.
                        
I want the women out here to be whatever they want 
and nobody is allowed to say shit about it.
Lilac and speed of light, ultraviolet
a thing so much itself you can’t even see it.

Let there be that light, from our beginning.
We’re starting all the way over.

Photo by Nong on Unsplash

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Caroline Miller is a poet and essayist who writes about art, landscapes, and feminism. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Wyoming, and her work has previously appeared in West Trade Review, Pidgeonholes, Gordon Square Review, and elsewhere.

A 2025 Pushcart Prize nominee, Caroline's poem can be found in Issue 28 of Glassworks.