If You Give a Poet an Invitation to the Cosmos Club

by | Jul 23, 2026

An illustration of two women dressed in evening-wear, looking up at the Milky Way in the night sky.

“La Voie Lactée” (1921), George Barbier. Courtesy of The Public Domain Review.

She’ll bring a tote to collect weeds & wildflowers. Situated on Embassy Row, lies
a club of brains & business cards. Everyone is an expert in everything, especially getting
to their table early & moving their name tent to a new chair: a routine so familiar
it’s dubbed the “Granny War,” but I see it more as a game of slapjack in slacks.

Dinner begins with white wine, an eggy popover & citrus-kissed arugula.
Then a slab of Alaskan salmon stains the gilded room pink.
A Spanish flan follows, wobbly as a water bomb concealed in a cloud.
I’m a clover among manicured milieux, hearty enough to withstand trampling.
A former CIA official with wormy temple veins is flirty with a Penguin Random House editor,
a physician with an insecurity to be bare decorates her body in handcrafted jewelry—
fat pearls offset tissue-thin clavicles, Argentium silver arrests wrists—
a brigadier general—all cummerbund—revisits the rapport between Roosevelt & Churchill,
an attorney has a corneal arcus, chocolate starlight mints for eyes
which reminds me Mario & David live in the apartment above a Mars, Inc. heiress,
a chief justice pollinates the hall, bromeliads bloom in her footsteps
& we continue to blah-blah because it’s the Cosmos Club after all.
The final nectar of the night is served in a demitasse:
Do I want to be warm & wealthy? Full-bodied?
Yes, but caffeine is complex:
Life begins after it, or does it cramp creativity?
I would rather be decaf & diffuse, to feel like a barely-attended-to anecdote
while people share abroad stories about crunched-up cities
where roads are closer to the sun, almond trees are ample sources of shade
& banana fiber is repurposed into hair extensions.
For most members, the club is a nucleus around which they organize their lives.
Ruth has come to love routine & a screwdriver. She orders a hot fudge sundae
every day at the Garden Bar—saving the cherry for last. When the drupe tears off,
will her legacy be that of a stem—wiry & woody—a trachea with no lungs?
After attending a panel on the shuttering of local newspapers, I return home—
uncoated—attempting to fall asleep but my brain is breakneck as a web press.
Peeking through my eyelashes, I see passageways I never owned as mine,
traces of voices who saw in me something I could never see.
As poets, we grow taproots into high solute.
We demonstrate distinction by grafting stories into souvenirs.
Out in the world, we’re twinkly. Something about us draws
strangers near. Peak plasma—they know—we’ll treat them as stars.
Hannah Goff

Hannah Goff

Publab Fellow 2026

Hannah Goff is a poet and pop culture encyclopedia. She holds a BA in English with a creative writing emphasis from Colgate University. Her poems embrace the tension between musicality and meaning while exploring themes of nature, family, food, grief, nostalgia, and travel. She will be attending University College Dublin to pursue an MA in journalism and international affairs. Hannah spends her free time laughing at New Yorker cartoons, studying Saturday Night Live, attempting Martha Stewart recipes, making zines, and dreaming of scarlet macaws.