“Space, the final frontier. These are the...”
I still hear them, the catchy theme songs
that turn evenings to light-years, islands
to civilizations, 3-hour tours to lifetimes.

Mary Ann, Ginger, or Mrs. Howell?
Lucy, Sally, or Olive Oil? I aimed to be
like Popeye or Thurston Howell the Third
but turned into a Gilligan answering to
an overbearing Skipper—but without
an eponymous island like TV’s Gilligan. 

I dreamed of cruising stars and starlets
like Kirk, but morphed into the Professor,
way too spacey to star in my own spin-off.
On my deserted island, only Kirk gets off.

Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, Cincinnati Review, RHINO, Quarterly West, I-70 Review, Fairy Tale Review, and Rattle, among others. Kenton writes from Northern California.