Christopher Cokinos’s newest book is the 2019 collection The Underneath, winner of a New American Press Poetry Prize selected by Gabe Gudding. He has a poem forthcoming in Dava Sobel’s new poetry column in Scientific American and an essay on the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer recently in Dark Mountain. At work on a multi-faceted manuscript about the Moon, Cokinos is also co-editor, with Julie Swarstad-Johnson, of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight, due out in fall 2020 from the University of Arizona Press. The poems in this Mudlark Flash are from a circulating collection called “Sofa on an Ancient Sea.” A professor at the University of Arizona, Cokinos divides his time between Tucson and an old cabin in Northern Utah’s Logan Canyon. He has a telescope and can show you sights on the Moon.