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What is the difference between beautiful girls and ordinary ones? My face was symmetrical. I’d taken Accutane. I wore the right things. None of it made a difference next to Tarryn. She had a shimmer about her, a light that I could never fully understand. I couldn’t even make eye contact with her. It was like staring at the headlights of a car on a dark road. Later, in my sorority, and even later at my job, I’d meet other women like her and wonder how they were made.
 

After some time my husband reached over to hold my hand, which reminded me that at least there was this, at least we still had hands that remembered how to love each other, two bone-and-flesh flaps that hadn't complicated their simple love by speaking or thinking or being disappointed or having memories. They just held and were held and that is all. Oh, to be a hand.

The pond is like a mackerel skin tonight,

the mackerel like a beaded evening bag.

This is like that, that is like this, oh,

let's call the whole thing off and take it straight:

nothing is like anything else.

Even the parrot and the apish ape

mirror, mimic and do like — unmatched.

To begin:  algae, abalone, alewife —

each the spitting image of itself.

Likewise beetles (potato, scarab and whirligig.)

Nothing even comes close to barrel cactus,

nothing is more original than a bog,

more rare than the cougar and crane —

save all the above named.

I've never seen anything like it — dustbowls,

deer, the descent of man and estuaries,

flakes of snow (no two like) fire,

flax, gannets and gulls.

Honeybees and the Hoover Dam

are unique -- there is nothing like a dam.

Ditto inbreeding, ice ages, industrialization,

joshua trees, lagoons and the law

that to liken a lichen is tautological.

Indeed, the rule of diminishing simile holds

that all of these are idiosyncracies:

the Leakeys, legumes, maize, marsupials and moose.

Virtually nothing is extraneous here —

not orchids, ooze, pampas nor peat.

This is the world of plenitude and power —

every bit of it out of this world:

the rain and rattlers, sperm, swamps and swans.

As now we inch toward an end — vectors

and a winter that figures to be like no other,

say the selfsame earth is to your liking,

and let us continue — yeast, yuccas, zoons,

all things like, beyond compare.

There are no limits to our verbs, our forms:

                                                                        think of the knife

that slits an orange or bundled iris stems, the one strapped

to the rooster’s varnished spur. The dagger, poniard, dirk.

Edge that snips the line, whittles an owl, juliennes, traces a lip.

A cut, an incision, a gouge. In Sudan, the story goes, when the slogan

of reform was The Future’s in Your Hands, men scavenged the streets

waving machetes, hacking off hands above the wrist, asking

How will you hold the future now? The stiletto, the skean, the scythe,

The choosing, the mark, the tool. Beneath a concrete bridge,

shirtless & drunk, a boy works his way through the swallows’ nests,

slashing until each mud cone-shape drops into the river, dissolves.

Yet to say so is hardly enough. To say pigsticker’s, bayonet, shiv.

The precision of the map allowed Maria to read the planet’s history like a type of braille. As hinted by the initial data, the northern hemisphere proved to be the smoothest surface that had ever been observed in the solar system. Most of the terrain seemed to tilt slightly to the north, suggesting that a planetwide drainage system may have once emptied there, into a great northern ocean. Inscribed onto the surface was even a possible shoreline, Deuteronilus, which could be traced for thousands of kilometers. The coast ran along nearly the same elevation, with variations that could be explained by the ground rebounding, exhaling as the weight of a sea of long-gone water evaporated. With each new detail Maria plotted, another aspect of Mars’s history came to life. 
     Mars Global Surveyor changed what it meant to see a planet. If the old map of Mars was a simple picture, the new map was a portrait. It went beyond what our eyes could take in, capturing data on contours, on composition, on forces we could not see—not just topography but things like magnetic signals and mineral compositions measured out beyond the visible wavelengths. There were subtleties to be seen—we just had to get there, and when we got there, we had to know how to look.

Excerpt(s) from The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson, copyright © 2020 by Sarah Stewart Johnson. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

I had been in Ireland for six months, living mostly in Dublin, and I knew the unspoken rules of the Irish pub well enough to know that I was breaking most of them. I was a woman and I was alone. I was drinking stout instead of lager, a pint instead of a half pint. I was trying to pay for my own drink and, since there was no real lounge in this pub, I had no choice but to sit with the men. These were things a woman, traditionally, should not do, but I had a strong sense that in Ireland most rules had been created precisely that they might be broken…